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13 mistakes to avoid in SEO |
- Don’t stuff too many keywords into places where they don’t belong.
- Don’t optimize for search engines at the cost of human visitors; if someone told you adding a dash to the domain name helps your rankings, but you feel that dash might confuse your customers, then don’t add it.
- Don’t trust people who promise you “instant #1 rankings”, “guaranteed top 10 positions” or anything of the sort.
- Don’t link to others from your site just because they promised a link back to you.
- Don’t link to others just because they paid you, unless you know exactly what you’re doing (i.e. you know about “bad neighborhoods,” the “no follow” attribute, Page Rank, JavaScript-ads vs text links, what it means to get Google axed and so on).
- Don’t create multiple pages with exactly the same content.
- Don’t “litter” your URL on other people’s sites (and don’t let others people “litter” URLs on your site; if you have a web forum, keep it spam-free).
- Don’t invest in a cheap server that won’t be able to cope with your traffic; don’t build your whole site on free website tools only – if you want to have a high-quality site & server, you need to pay for it.
- Don’t worry about a page’s meta descriptions, meta keywords and such; your time is better spent creating content.
- Don’t use tools that automatically submit your site’s URL to directories, search engines and such.
- Don’t present different content to search engines than you present to users; for example, don’t hide your text to visitors and show it to search engines.
- Don’t “over-optimize"; relax, if search engines required webmasters to heavily optimize, they’d be doing a very bad job.
- In general, don’t try to outsmart search engines (unless perhaps you intend to dedicate your life to that task); those maintaining search engines are paid to outsmart webmaster tricks, so in the long run, chances for successful tricks are low
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