All you have to do is pay close attention to not do any of the following. Getting banned rarely happens but if it happens it is almost a guarantee that your website will remain banned. Google has a sort of submission form, so you can request re inclusion in the index if you got banned. You can use this to try and get your website back.

Linking to a banned website.

If you are doing link exchanges this rarely if every happens, because if a website is banned they no longer keep doing link exchanges. But if you know of a website that is banned, then obviously do not link exchange with it.

Doing nasty things can create problems, the worse case is getting banned. Keyword stuffing for instance or trying to cheat the search engines using black hat software can raise red flags to the search engines.

Keyword stuffing is when you over repeat your keywords in the meta tags or on your website. So keep meta tags short and clean.

Everything that looks like cheating should be avoided. You can hide what you are doing from your visitors but not the search engines. If you put a bunch of keyword on your homepage with white color text so they are hidden, search engine still see that.

Having said all this, if you intentions are good then you are 99.9 per cent safe.

So why black hat software can get your website banned.

The answer is quite simple. Search engines do not want sites that are cheating their way to the top. They do like it if you are optimizing your website to get high rankings. That is something they recommend in fact.

But cheating or spamming using black hat software most often create garbage on the web and in the search engine index. Obviously no one wants that, neither search engines.

Many things can go wrong if you are using black hat software and you never know when.

Other people can report your website as spam. Google has a form where you can report spam in their index. If your website gets several reports of spam or even one and it is verified as spam, you are risking being banned.

Once again if your intentions are good, even if you get a hundred complaints from nasty competitors maybe who just want to out rank you, your site will not get banned. They manually review each website before they ban it.

So these are just things to keep in mind when doing seo. These are bad when you repeat over and over again. Even if you over repeat keywords in the meta tags your rankings will drop maybe, but it will not get your website banned the next day you do it. Some by mistake or without proper knowledge put as many keywords as they wish in the meta tags. Just fix that and you be safe.

That is how to get your website banned, by treating search engines like you treat a game with your friends. You try and cheat. Your friends probably ban you as well.

Remember just like email clients created spam and junk folder the same way do search engines. They created the nofollow tag and other sophisticated measures that work like a charm against spam.