Dev Element

Webmasters these days use a number of techniques to enhance the aesthetics and SEO of their clients sites. They realize that their clients main goal is to have a site that is appealing both to the public and the major search engines. Pleasing both types of visitors will determine the success of a website or blog. One of the tactics commonly employed by web designers to optimize a site is hidden text.

Hidden text is defined as text that is formatted to be unseen by human visitors to a site, but is able to be seen by search engine robots and spiders within the HTML of a site. Back in the 1990s, the use of hidden text was exploited by a number of webmasters. They were using hidden text to increase the keyword density of their sites and boost their positioning in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This caused the major search engines to revise their guidelines and view hidden text, in the majority of its forms, as spamming. As you may already know, spamming is the premier reason why sites are removed from the SERPs. However, the limited and legitimate use of hidden text is not considered spam and can actually add SEO value to your site.

Here are two examples of techniques NOT to use to create hidden text:

1. Placing white text on a white background

2. Setting the font size to 0, or a negative number

Here are two examples of ACCEPTABLE techniques to use to create hidden text:

1. Using CSS to place the text off of the screen

2. Specifying an attribute of display:none

***The above techniques are referenced from SEOmoz-read the full article by clicking here

A great example of the appropriate use of hidden text can be found on Dev Element blogs. To maintain the aesthetics of our sites, we hide one line of code, the H2 tag. This tag contains the main keywords of our sites and does help to improve each blogs SEO value. In certain cases a blog owner may be contacted by Google in regards to their H2 tag. Though it may be easy to believe that the problem lies with the text being hidden, in actuality the contents of the H2 tag can be causing the trouble. This happens when a blog that has a high number of keywords in that tag and are irrelevant to the content of the site. While one option may be to remove the H2 tag completely, all a site owner would really needed to do was to reduce the number of keywords in the tag and make sure the keywords used were completely relevant to the site.

It is also important to know that the H2 tag is the ONLY text that is hidden on our sites, keeping our sites well within the guidelines of acceptable use of hidden text. So, to answer the question of to hide or not to hide? Only on a very limited basis and never for the deception of the search engines-that is the answer.

More resources on the use of hidden text:

Google, SEO and using CSS to hide text

Google Okays Hidden Text