4 Deadly SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid at All Costs
It’s not unusual to see people making some very small but costly mistakes when they’re trying to rank their sites high in the search engines. These are the kind of mistakes that we all make at some point or another when/if we don’t know. However, the key here is to correct them and not repeat any of them. Given below are such SEO blunders that you need to avoid at all costs:
photo credit: davedehetre
Keyword Stuffing
This is undoubtedly one of the biggest and the most expensive mistakes one can make. You can also call the act of keyword stuffing “over optimizing”. A lot of people and web designers feel that when they add a desired keyword into the content of a page and its template, they will increase the chances of getting ranked higher. However, one must keep in mind that the search engines are intelligent. They look for a natural flow of keywords within the content body of the site. If you try to stuff your page with keywords, then it will be detected by them very easily. It’s usually fairly easy to satisfy the search engines: Just write naturally. The keyword density will most likely be fine. If your site offers good, fresh, quality content and the keywords are relevant to the theme of your site, then the search engines will reward you with a good ranking.
Build It, and It Will Rank
It’s hard to believe but there are still people out there who have this assumption that all they need to do is get their site indexed, search engines will rank it automatically in good positions over time. But they forget the fact that by injecting even the basic SEO practices into their website, they can rank better than the others. If a site is badly optimized, the chances are high that it will never be able to get a good ranking. Getting top search engine positions is not difficult, you have to do your homework first and implement the optimization process as much as you can, in a natural way.
Just Depending on Social Media
As we all know, social networking sites have gained a lot of popularity in the recent few months and there’s a big buzz around these, especially Twitter and Facebook. The reason is that they have spread by word of mouth and have made their way into people’s lives, becoming a need to them. But are they any good when it comes to link building? The right answer is they are worthless for SEO purposes. Facebook and Twitter might spit out quality traffic from time to time, but the backlinks you get from them are “No Follow”. This simply means that you won’t be getting any leverage from the links on these social sites. If you have been dependent on such sites to give you link juice, then you better start looking elsewhere.
Building Links Unethically
This is a serious issue that is growing day by day due to heavy competition. Many websites nowadays are trying to improve their rankings by unethical link building. There are unethical SEO companies out there who promise to give websites a large amount of links fast and easy. Even though they do deliver results and the links are indeed generated, the manner in which it is done is totally unethical and this could ultimately have your website banned from the search engines for indulging into unethical practices. If you’re outsourcing your work to a SEO company, make sure you know how the links are being generated, so that you avoid to get into trouble.
People always give up half way…they should be determined…SEO is not 1 day work…it takes time…u will see results after a few months work..
Thank you
Some of the so called pro SEO company even spam you with so many thing that they say will help you rank better in SEO, with some extra fees, of course.
For me, I love reading free advice from SEO gurus like you.
Thanks again.
You can do as many as you like, as long as they are relevant to the post and deliver value. If you do the comments yourself and really read the posts, you will not make more than maybe 5 or 10 a day anyhow.
I’m glad that you brought into light that Facebook and Twitter have no value when it comes to SEO. I’m sure there is some value, just not for SEO. Very nice.
As Leah stated above.. This is not a onetime work industry. Patience is the key when it comes to SEO. Many webmasters want to get ranked really fast, which is never possible and some of them want to do links for sometime and then leave it off. SEO is an on going process, one should be on top of content and regularly build links to stay in competition. Your points emphasizes its importance vividly.
Hi HP,
Great site you have full of useful SEO information.
I am relatively new to SEO and am finding my way with link building. The biggest problem I have is actually finding Do Follow blogs that are both relevant and with good PR.
Any tips please?
.
Cool article. Have to say that with my first ever website, I was guilty of the build it, and it will rank mistake, never again though. When you mention keyword stuffing, what would you class as keyword stuffing? I have read all different figures for the optimal keyword density but as a rule tend to stick anywhere between 3% and 9%. What are your thoughts?
If you look at keyword density as a percentage figure, you are a little off. Here is an article by Matt Cutts that sums it up pretty well:
I would add the 5th… from my own experience!
Buy variations of the same domain and park the domains on top of the main domain, instead of add-on them and redirecting with 301 to the main domain, and you will see a nice supplemental index penalty against you.
That’s because Google will index every domain and it will think that domain.com, domain.net, dmoain.com are just spammy websites since they share the same content.