What not to do
If you get SEO wrong, you can be ‘sandbagged’ and removed from the Google search results for at least one month.
Irrelevant content
To keep Google’s search results relevant, they are continually cracking down on people who try to get artificially high search engine rankings.
An example of this is people adding popular generic search keywords their site. Good logic – but Google are quite good at working out what your site is about by analyzing the content of your site. So if your site isn’t actually anything to do with your keywords, you won’t get good rankings.
‘Keyword stuffing’
Google will analyse the density of the keywords on your site. If you did add the words Company Formation 300 times to your homepage, you will probably be penalized.
There are ways of doing this which hide the keywords from your customers, but Google will still find them and penalize you (voice of experience!).
‘Artificial link creation’
There are companies out there offering hundreds of thousands of incoming link in the belief that this will help raise your search results. These don’t help! Google is clever enough to realize that a website will only grow in popularity organically – you don’t suddenly get 100,000 links appear overnight to your site. Plus these link farms aren’t ‘quality links’, so are unlikely to help even if you survive being banned for trying to cheat the system.
’Reciprocal linking’
If you are a webmaster you can expect plenty of emails asking for a reciprocal link. (You link to me and I’ll link to you), this is fine so long as the linking is relevant, and someone has contacted you directly however avoid doing this with anyone who has sent a blanket email to hundreds of email addresses.
‘Hidden Links’
These are very old spamming tricks, frowned upon by Search engines - don’t bother!
- hidden text that also happens to be hyperlinked, e.g. white text on a white background
- using CSS to style hyperlinks e.g. 1 pixel high text
- hiding links in something like a full stop in the middle of a paragraph of text
‘Guaranteed number 1 placement’
No company can guarantee this for a search engine like Google, since Google doesn’t take payment for placed results. Therefore, these companies are either lying, using techniques that are likely to get you banned, or guaranteeing placement for an extremely obscure combination of keywords (see www.googlewhack.com for a collection of Number 1 ranked sites!).
Dynamic URL’s
As mentioned before, make sure that the URL for your websites are relevant and easy to use.
Using Frames
Many search engines cannot index text within frames. If your site is designed using frames it is recommended that it is re-designed without them to get good listings within search engines.
Flash homepage
Search engines cannot index pages made entirely with FLASH. When you submit a page to a search engine a spider will follow the links on the page and listing the rest of the site. The best way to remedy this is to create a site map that uses normal html links to every page on your site. Also add a standard HTML link on each page of you site that links to the site map.
http://www.searchengineoptimising.com/optimisation/index.htm
Javascript only content – specifically menus
Search engines can't follow links that are within Javascript, so your site will not get spidered unless you also have some form standard HTML hyperlinks that they can follow. You should add some form standard HTML hyperlinks to all of your pages on each of your pages so that your site will be spidered properly. An easy way to do this is to create a site map page uses standard HTML links to link to every page on your site. Then add a standard HTML link on each page of your site that links to the site map.
http://www.searchengineoptimising.com/optimisation/index.htm
Over-submitting to search engines
They won’t be fooled, if you keep submitting your website to search engines they will catch on and you will be punished.
http://www.searchengineoptimising.com/optimisation/index.htm
Very long or very short pages
Some search engines have problems with these.
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/search-engine-optimisation/basics.shtml
Using Word to create HTML code
Using Microsoft Word to create copy text, then using the ‘Save as web page’ function will create huge amounts of unnecessary code, which as we’ve mentioned is not helpful.
