Things never to do with SEO

Today we are going to discuss some things you should avoid when optimizing your blog/website for search engines. Shall we begin?

SEO Spam and and paying to submit to directories.

Have you ever seen ads around the internet stating that they will submit your website to hundreds or thousands of search engines? How about 500 directories? Or maybe buying thousands of backlinks for a small price? Never give in to this, you just can’t buy this kind of work for $25.00 . Your site will be submitted to link farms of a directory. No SEO can gaurantee a number one ranking and for a small price your site won’t be submitted to all those directories and search engines. No true SEO is a spammer.

Have you ever put your content across several domains?

This is not something good to do unless you have a bulk user base and for certain content considerations. This will get a bunch of your sites in the SERPS so look up more about sub-domains and domains with search engine optimization. Submitting to search engines can’t hurt but really, only submit to a couple of the top ones. Usually you won’t have to do this because the search engines will automatically crawl your website when you are linked with a site that is being crawled.

Make your pages crawlable!

Now you never want to make your site to where a crawler can’t access it or crawl all of your pages you want. This happens when you don’t write your robots.txt file correctly. Also having sessions Id’s or too many variables in your urls can effect this. Always use words and keywords of your categories and topics in your urls. When you have a navigation menu you, never use all all images or flash. The crawlers cannot read these things. Unless you have a portfolio or something related, never use an all image or flash website period. Crawlers read the text in your site, the aren’t human and cannot read the text or images in flash.

For more information on optimizing your navigation menu’s and a better explanation on using text instead of flash and all images, check out a previous topic I wrote on optimizing your categories .

Targeting general keywords and why not to.

If you are starting a website or blog and if your website isn’t ranked well yet, never try to target general popular keywords that have a lot of competition. Always optimize for relevant specific keywords that will bring traffic that you targeted traffic. For example, you have a video game website and you decide to target the keyword “Gaming”. You will be blown away by competition without a chance, even if ranked decently. Try to rank for something more relevant than just general gaming and start off with some keywords that have lower competition and build your way up as you go up in ranking.

Keyword stuffing and irrelevant keywords.

This is a DON’T and you can get banned from it by Google. Stuffing your meta tags with irrelevant keywords means that these keywords have no relation to your website or topic. Google does not like this even though google does not base rankings off of meta tags anymore because it was too abused in the past it is still good to use them anyways. The max you should use is roughly 600-700 characters in a meta tag. Limit it to no more than about twenty targeted phrase of maybe two words or more. Make sure you separate them with commas of course. If you are using the same keyword avoid using it more than three to seven times. List them in the order of how important they are to your website and what you are trying to rank for. Do not use hidden keywords as text in your pages (people generally do this in the footer). Google considers this spam and will ban you for this. People do this by stuffing them in the footer and making the text the same color as the background color.

Avoid duplicate content.

Try to avoid this and avoid using the same titles in every page. If your page is on a certain topic, use the topics keywords in the title. Do the same with the pages of your categories. Don’t use www.blah.com and blah.com to direct to your homepage. Believe it or not, these both are two seperate addresses and will be considered duplicate content. Don’t link your home page with www.blah.com/index.html from www.blah.com either. Use the one address that you established for your website.

Site layout, structure , usablity.

Make sure that your site is optimized for both your users and search engine spiders. Use proper structure, navigation, descriptive links and text and headers. You want your website to look good and be easy to navigate your your users and visitors but at the same time you want it to where spiders will just eat your site and pages up. I stress again using text over images as much as possible.

Back-linking to relevant sites.

If your website is let’s say once again, about “Gaming” , don’t link to a weight-loss website because you have nothing in common. When building back links, you always want to build links between you and websites that are relevant and similar to what your website is about. This will work out for the both of you and eventually you can get more back links through those people.

Using anchor text and mixing it up.

When using anchor text, don’t use the exact same anchor text for each site that you are building a back link from. Switch it up. This is called unnatural link building. So vary up your keywords in your anchor text on different websites with keywords that are related to your site and related to words you are trying to rank for. If you don’t know what anchor text is, read up on a couple previous articles that I wrote that discusses Building Page Rank and Getting Indexed In Google fast .

Spamming your link.

I am sure you have seen tips on commenting in guest-books, blogs, forums and so on so fourth. There is a difference between posting comments with a link in it and spamming it. Most of the time, you have the option of including your link when posting in a blog or guest-book. In a forum you can include your link in your signature. Don’t just down right spam your link all over fast in hopes of getting traffic and links back to your site. This won’t help and you will get banned and more than likely your post will be deleted. Nobody likes a spammer, not even you.

Quit worrying about ranking.

Everyone seems to obsess and fret over Google page rank more than they should. If you keep up with the key fundamentals of running a website or a blog, your ranking will go up more and more as time goes on. Quit worrying about it because just focusing on this will end up cramping your style. Focus on keeping your site and/or blog updated with fresh unique content daily, interacting with your visitors, users, and other blog members, and keep doing basic SEO on your pages and you will be fine. Also, quit checking your rankings every single day. They are going to do what they are gonna do, let them be and stay focused.

This list can go on and on…and on! These are some key tips to running a successful site and keeping your optimization A-1. If you have any other tips feel free to comment.