There are many ways, legal and approved ways that will increase the visibility of a website; however there are also ways that should be avoided, no matter what. The consequences can be disastrous for the website and getting involved in any of them will not be a good thing. Here are just some of the things that should be avoided, that should not make the major search engines ban the site from their SERPs or flag the site as a spam site.
First, do not ever enter into any relationships with other programs that promise link exchange activities. Although this should increase the visibility of the website, unfortunately numerous sites here may be involved in some unapproved SEO activities. These will get those sites banned or penalized the least and if they are linked to your site, then it too will get penalized with them.
Secondly, there are those FFA pages or the free for all links pages which includes a lot of links that are not even related to the specific market that your website would be categorized under. There are some sites like car parts and baby shower sites linked to a health and beauty site. These may be extreme but they do happen. So stay away from a page which does not even have a general theme in it.
Third, a common SEO advice would be to go to competing sites and to leave comments on the sites which should include your site’s link. This would be fine in principal but make sure to do these in sites which are related to your website. Do not leave links in websites completely unrelated to your site. Their visitors would not be interested in your site so it would be an exercise in futility.
The three things to avoid can be easily done but it they can also be tempting to the desperate webmasters. Do not give up doing everything you can to increase the traffic to the website, just make sure that you do SEO methods which are acceptable and does not leave your site in a bad light.