So you’ve just learned about the magic of SEO or search engine optimization.
You’ve even read up a bit on stuff like social media, as well as inbound marketing and affiliate marketing. You have the confidence to do it on your own, and you’re excited to start getting more hits on your website.
All you need to do is sit down in front of your computer and go.
Before you get on your way to plugging keywords and linking pages, take a moment to read this list of six things that you should not do when using SEO.
1# Keyword Overload
Keywords are vital to SEO, but you can’t just go around stuffing them into every bit of space in your web pages.
Jamming multiple keywords into your articles to the point of incomprehensibility won’t get you anywhere. If keywords aren’t relevant to the content, search engines will ignore them. If people do stumble upon those pages, they will not get what they’re looking for and leave right away.
The major search engines also won’t pick up keywords in comments and style tags, so don’t bother with that.
2# Keyword Hiding
So instead of cramming keywords in every chunk of text, you might resort to just hiding them. Readers surely won’t mind something they can’t see, right?
Actually, putting them in small and/or unreadable text all over the page for padding is even worse.
Hiding keywords in the margins by making them the same color, placing them at the very bottom as incredibly tiny text or including them in the page’s source code will probably get your site filtered for spamming, if not outright banned.
3# Keywords in Doorways
So you can’t have too many keywords on your important pages.
How about dumping them in one page that the viewers have to go through, before getting to the page they really want to check?
Besides being completely unethical trying to game the system this way, visitors will also not get exactly what they’re looking for. Again, you end up turning away potential regular visitors, as well as risking the possibility of getting banned by search engines.
4# Using Competing Keywords
If you want your website to be seen, why not use highly competitive keywords?
Because if you do, you’ll probably get eaten alive by bigger and more established websites using the very same keywords.
If your website focuses on a subject that is unavoidably popular, use long tail keywords instead. These are “keywords” that are actually phrases and have at least three words in them. Find a niche and get specific. You might not get as much traffic, but you can build on it with a more loyal audience looking for things only you can provide.
5# Same Link in All Pages
Putting the same links in all the pages of your site makes navigation to other websites easier, and also allows for more advertisement.
There was nothing wrong with this link building practice until today, where search engines now start penalizing websites with site-wide links.
Just put these links on the pages where they are most relevant to your landing page to keep these connections without losing traffic.
6# Linking to Link Farms
Linking to a network of websites filled with all sorts of content and more links sounds like a good idea in the beginning.
Unfortunately, these networks called “link farms” are mostly filled with spam—those who are trying to increase their own traffic in the crudest of ways. It’s also common to see that these link farms are networks dealing with shady things like pornography and gambling.
Thus, search engines see them as spam. If you’re found to be linking to such sites, don’t expect to rank very high in search engines.
Trying to increase traffic on your website by resorting to “quick and easy methods” usually end in no traffic at all (due to getting filtered as spam or getting outright banned). Search engine optimization isn’t really a magic fix for your page view woes. It takes time and effort, like any legitimate work.
Better to earn your results the hard way than taking shortcuts and learning the hard way.
Question: Have u used any of the above method? Please feel free to share your experience the comments below to help the community.
Photo credit: sboneham
