5 Tips on What to Avoid When Doing SEO
There are lots SEO strategies being developed over the course of many years. And while a good number of them can give you solid results, several of these are not only a major waste of time and resources but will also lead to your site being banned. If you are planning on pursuing an SEO campaign, its best to know what are the fundamental Do’s and Don’ts in SEO.
Here are some of the things to avoid when doing SEO:
Avoid Spamdexing
A good number of SEO strategies are controversial in nature, a class known as black hat SEO or generally as spamdexing.
Since spamdexing usually degrade the relevance of a search engine's query results, many search engines, including the big 3: Google, Yahoo! and Bing, employ techniques that will exclude the spamdexing websites from their search indices. Not only spamdexing will be counterproductive, doing so will potentially ban your website from most search engine indices as well.
Keep Flash, AJAX and Frames at a Minimum
Interactive web applications like Flash, AJAX and Frames are elements that give absolute aesthetic value to your site but otherwise won't factor a whit in an SEO campaign.
One reason is because most search engines can't index these files, and if it does it's often done improperly. Search engine spiders are very limited in function, and most can't crawl through a, say, packed .SWF content.
If you have a nice content, best leave it to spider-friendly webpage text, which you can easily build links and optimize it with keywords. That way, search engine spiders will crawl though your site and index it without problem. Keep Flash, AJAX and Frames at a minimum.
Do Not Rely on Paid Links
Since Google and most major search engines use links as determinant of a website's reputation and value, webmasters began practicing the buying and selling of links which, of course, doesn't always fulfill the users' requirements. As such, paid links had become a way of search engine manipulation.
Although there are paid links that don't violate search engine guidelines, most are and can get your website banned if caught.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
The primary purpose of search engine spiders is to index the pages of your website. It will detect keywords within your content and use these for ranking whenever a search string matching a keyword (on your site) is typed in by a user.
Keyword stuffing is the act of loading a webpage with keywords, both relevant and irrelevant, to obtain maximum search engine ranking. Because of this manipulation, major search engines like Google have devise techniques that can identify keyword stuffing within pages.
The same as any spamdexing strategies, keyword stuffing can get your website blacklisted from most search engine indices.
Thinking of Quantity over Quality
"A small number of the most high quality most targeted, authoritative and relevant links will do more for your rankings than 1,000 crappy, irrelevant links."
To best understand why quality is more important than quantity, we need to see link building from the perspective of Google. Google places a value on every website and every webpage that it indexes. The most famous measure of a website and webpage's value is Google's PageRank.
Google assigns each webpage a ranking from 0 to 10 as a measure of its authority. Webpages with a ranking of 0 are typically very new and insignificant. Webpages with a ranking of 10 carry an unprecedented amount of authority. An example of a webpage or website with a rank or zero might be a new blog or a newly published webpage. An example of a PageRank of ten would be the Google.com or Facebook.com.
Google considers links that come from websites with a higher PageRank to be more important than links that come from websites with a lower PageRank. However, it is important to understand that Google's 1 to 10 scale is not linear, rather the authority of a website increases exponentially with each increase in PageRank. In other words, a website with a RageRank of 1 has approximately 10 times the authority of a website with a PageRank of 0, but a website with a PageRank of 5 has approximately 100,000 the authority of a website with a PageRank of 0. What this means that one good link from a website with a PageRank of 5 can be much more powerful than 100 or perhaps even 1,000 links from a website with a PageRank of 0.
In addition to PageRank, there are several other factors that determine the quality of a link and why focusing your link building efforts on obtaining quality links is more important than focusing on quantity links. Relevance of the backlink is perhaps the most important.
Source: Quickranks
