SEO Mistakes to Avoid
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is an effective way to increase website traffic. As with any promotional technique, there are certain mistakes which people should be careful to avoid in SEO. Here is a list of some of the more common mistakes.
1. Paying for a website submission service which claims to submit your site to hundreds of thousands (or millions) of directories and/or search engines: These “directories” are typically long link pages that don’t manually screen their links; they offer no SEO benefit or cause your website to be penalized by search engines. It is best to avoid submission services of this type. However, services which submit sites to dozens or hundreds of directories are often legitimate.
2. Buying links from completely unrelated websites is another one of the common mistakes. While purchasing links on sites about similar topics can be good for search engine optimization, other links offer less or possibly no benefit. Particularly with regard to Google, they might be detected as paid links and additionally penalized. Either way, links on sites about relevant subjects are usually better for SEO and less risky. It is also preferable to buy a few high-quality links than to purchase many of low quality.
3. Completely designing a website and then thinking about SEO: Some web designers and site owners lack understanding of SEO, so they create the designs and content of websites without any thought to it. Only when there are too few hits do they realize the need for SEO. These mistakes can lead to a lot of wasted time and money. It is better to avoid this by taking SEO into account during the initial design process, obtain search optimized content for the site, and start SEO promotional efforts from the beginning.
4. Using manipulative techniques like redirecting one web page to another unrelated page, or putting lots of keywords at the end of the page in very small text: Methods like these may provide some temporary SEO benefits to the website operator, but search engines eventually recognize and crack down on them. When this happens, the search result rankings of websites using such methods are often penalized. It is better avoid these mistakes and instead put effort into long-term, legitimate techniques.
Other possible mistakes to avoid include trading links with disreputable sites, submitting individual pages of a site to search engines or directories, and using repetitious phrases in the site’s META tags.
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Link Building | seowhitehats | September 1, 2008
