What is SEO?

There are lots of ways to get your site listed in the search engines and to improve your position in the SERPS (seach engine results pages). It is easy to get ‘carried away’ with some of these, and it can act to your detriment. Some of these tricks may still work some of the time, but sooner or later you will probably see your site disappear from the results.

Some of these tricks are possible to achieve with CSS in ways that may or may not yet be detectible by search engines. For example text under pictures, multiple nested divs to disguise the text size and colour etc to confuse the search engines about what the real background colour and text colour or text size are. Try and trick them at your peril!

So here are some of the things NOT to do, because they can get you penalised.

1. Do not use invisibly small text - sometimes used to add lots of keywords to a page that the user can’t see but the search engine can
2. Do not use text with the same colour as the background of the page so that it is invisible - this has the same goal as above
3. Do not use keyword padding - excessive use of keywords is very likely to get you penalised. If you include your phrase ‘red widgets’ in the title, description, a header and a few times in the text, that’s good. If every item in the menu and every sentence in the text, and the alt text for the photos etc has the same phrase that’s not good, or natural. Use some variants on the same phrase. If you simply write natural text about your subject, that should give about the right ‘keyword density’, and each page will naturally have different titles and descriptions to avoid duplicate content penalties.
4. Don’t have duplicate text - pages that are copied from other sites, even with the permission of the owner, are likely to suffer the duplicate content penalty and be excluded from the search engines.
5. Do not subscribe to link building services that link your site to thousands of other, often irrelevant, sites, in return for which they all link to you. Remember you want relevant links, and you don’t want to risk linking to so-called ‘bad neighbourhoods’ - sites that have been banned themselves.
6. Cloaking. This is using trickery so that the page seen by the search engines is not the same page that a real user will see. BMW did this, got banned, and got reinstated 24 hours later. If you are not the size of BMW you can expect to wait considerably longer.
7. Don’t use redirects as a means of trickery. There are some correct uses of redirects eg 301 redirects in the .htaccess file when you have simply moved a file or directory and want users to see the new page instead of the original page. There is no problem using these. Basically you will know if you are using a javascript redirect for reasons of trickery - if you are I wouldn’t recommend it!
8. Over fast link building and directory submissions. Directory submission is good (well, I would say that, wouldn’t I). Submitting to 1,000 directories on the same day, all with identical anchor text and description is not good. For a new site, a few submissions a day is fine. For an older site you can get away with a faster rate.
9. Don’t spam other peoples forums and blogs with lots of entries just to get your signature to appear. But finding forums and blogs where you can make a constructive comment are a good way to build links, and build trust. This way you should even get traffic (visitors) as well as a link.
10. Don’t avoid linking to other peoples sites. If someone else has a site, blog or resource that would be useful to your visitors, link to it! This builds trust in your own site, which people will consider to be a useful resource and in turn will link back. It is easy to see links as having value that you are not going to give away for free - this is the wrong approach I think (although I might change my mind if I had a PR8 site, where links were worth $150 a month each!)

Please feel free to suggest other ’should not do’ suggestions as comments below.