SEO Best Practices Do’s and Don’ts Part 2

Yesterday, we covered things you should do to improve your website’s SEO, which I’m sure you’ve already started applying. Now we’re going to address what NOT to do, since these tactics will fail miserably and usually have a negative effect on your natural search engine rankings.  Whatever you do, avoid all of the activity we mention below – and if you’re currently doing any of these things, stop now!

SEO Best Practices Don’ts

1. Never Seek a Quick Fix: High search engine rankings take time and effort. If you find a service that promises millions of visitors overnight, run. These programs are generally based upon aggressive SPAM tactics, and using such services will usually result in having your website removed by the major search engines – including Google!
2. Avoid Link Farms: Link farms are websites that link to numerous other sites of any type with the hopes of improving search result rankings. Avoid them at all costs. All major search engines, including Google, view such sites as SPAM and often remove sites from their index for participating in such schemes. Remember, affiliate sites are not link farms. An affiliate site will offer valuable content of its own, and the links offered will be relevant to both their own content and to each other.
3. Avoid Splash Pages: Welcome pages for your website, with a big photo and a link that says “Enter Here” may look nice. Unfortunately, they’re terrible for your search engine rankings. These pages prohibit search engine crawlers from effectively spidering the other pages of your site.
4. Avoid Frames: Never use frames! Frames are too complex for search engine crawlers to index. Also, most users don’t like them and they make your site look very outdated.
5. Avoid Search-Box Navigation: This doesn’t mean that you don’t offer a search tool for your visitors. Just don’t let the search tool be your site’s primary method of navigation. Search engine crawlers cannot enter text into the search box to find your pages.
6. Eliminate Pop-Up Ads: Search engines don’t look favorably on pop-up ads, especially on a site’s homepage. Eliminating pop-up ads will win favor with both the search engines and your visitors.
7. Eliminate Hidden / Invisible Text: Never have text that’s the same color as its background, i.e., white text on a white page. Search engines immediately recognize this as a SPAM tactic and it often results in a site being removed from the search engines.

If you haven’t already, make sure to read yesterday’s post of SEO Best Practices Do’s. Now get on your site and review it with these tips.

You can thank us for your awesome website traffic later!