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 in a snap. If your site gets caught into the keyword stuffing mess, it can get penalized and trust me, it’s not a good thing. It’s easy to satisfy the search engines, just keep the content written in a natural flow. If your site offers good, fresh content and the keywords are relevant to the theme of your site, then the search engines will reward you with a good rank.

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 child’s play, 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, absolutely no. 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 dependant 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 are kept in the loop.

Tags: SEO, SEO Mistakes

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 6:19 pm and is filed under General SEO, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.