15 Don'ts of Search Engine Optimization

Small businesses are often hard-pressed for time and money. As a SEO, I often get queries from prospects about ‘obsolete’ directory submissions, meta tags and how and if I can rank them through these methods. Weird! As a SEO Provider, I would state few concerns to which you should not go for as these doesn’t counts any more. If you find any SEO provider is providing these services, you should say No NO to them and don’t hire them if you are incurring huge losses in your business.

If you want your online business to be successful, it's a good idea to optimize your site on a regular basis to make sure it's got a good position in the Web's top search engines. But did you verify whether your site is in safe hands? Here are some checklist –

1. Don’t respond to SPAM emails from SEO Providers - You don’t need to submit to 1,000 search engines or 500 directories. You can’t buy 2,000 quality links for $50. Even Google, in it’s terms and conditions mentions that there is no guarantee for rankings. An authentic SEO Company doesn’t send you SPAM.


2. SEO considerations should be part of the discussion from day one – You should not wait for SEO Implementation. Start right away with your SEO planning and marekting strategy.


3. Choose the best SEO Company – Now this is a major deal. You shouldn’t be ‘careless’ about the impacts of SEO and in choosing the right SEO Provider.


4. Avoid content duplication over domains – Do not spread your content over several domains. You should be well aware of pros and cons of using sub-domains and additional domains. Check closely your SEO person is not attempting to get multiple domains/sites listed in the SERPs.


5. Don’t waste your time submitting your URL to search engines. SE submissions are dead.


6. Check your robot.txt file – You must check your robot.txt file and if it is correctly placed. If the robot.txt file are incorrectly placed that would make the website uncrawlable.


7. Keep a close watch on the SEO Company and their efforts after you hire. It’s your job to know and understand as much as possible about the strategies and tactics your SEO company will be using. If your SEO company uses high-risk tactics and your site gets caught, you’ll be the one paying the price.


8. Don’t stuff keywords in your meta tags, image alt tags – Always check your site is not stuffed with excess keywords. These efforts sowed seeds in 1996-97, but not now. Stuffing keywords is regarded as SPAM.


9. Don’t stuff keywords in headers and footers of the website.


10. Have different Titles for each page. If you use same Titles for each page, you can’t avoid duplicate content issues and Google’s supplemental index.


11. Avoid Canonical issues and pagination – In GWMT, you should add www . domain .com and domain .com . They will convey Google that it is the same site.


12. Don’t ignore usability. Things like proper site structure, logical navigation, descriptive link text, etc., are good for both users and search engine spiders.


13. Always have a Blog for your site and create excellent content for your sites because they will fetch good customers.

14. How can you create great resourceful keyword enriched pages? - A glossary is an easy way to create a page of great, keyword-rich content. Also consider a frequently asked questions page, a testimonials page, how to articles, product support manuals and so on.


15. No excess Link plastering. Don’t plaster your link all over blog comments, guestbooks, etc. That’s called spamming, not SEO.

 

Good points! I've always felt that submitting URLs to search engines using website submission services is not doing anything for those URLs.

 

Thanks for sharing such a useful tips..It really help to increase our SEO efforts

 

Good points .thanks for sharing the nice information

 

Good points that should be avoid. Avoid over optimization and blackhat seo tactics.

 

Very good points that you have mentioned. This information will be useful to a newbie but able to a experience pro. Anyways thanks a lot for sharing this information.

 

I think you have missed one very important point....Social Media.

I believe in the coming time, having a strong social media presence will definitely be a major factor in search engine optimization. Earlier the social media is at the top of the search engine pyramid...but I think it will be there in the second level [Just after Content] in the Pyramid very soon.

The people who are not focusing on social media currently will face serious trouble with SEO as Google itself is more concerned about segregating the search engine results on the basis of social media presence [Apart from other factors]