14 things to be avoided for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Ok, folks I came across a very informative article related to some basics of search engine optimization at Google Blogoscoped, a blog that covers Google and the tech world since 2003 with 80% focus on Google. The person behind Google Blogoscoped is Philipp Lenssen and his posts are widely read.

(Philipp Lenssen has also interviewed Matt Cutts, Google’s Gadgets Guy back in Nov.2005. If you are interested, read the interview here.)

In this article he gives some basic tips about search engine optimization and somehow what caught my eye was the 14 steps he has mentioned, that should certainly be avoided while trying to optimize your search engine rankings and I thought of sharing it with all the fellow bloggers who have just started setting their sights on the Blogosphere.

Here is the 14 things that are an absolute no no:

• Don’t stuff too many keywords into places where they don’t belong.

• Don’t optimize for search engines at the cost of human visitors; if someone told you adding a dash to the domain name helps your rankings, but you feel that dash might confuse your customers, then don’t add it.

• Don’t trust people who promise you “instant #1 rankings”, “guaranteed top 10 positions” or anything of the sort.

• Don’t link to others from your site just because they promised a link back to you.

• Don’t link to others just because they paid you, unless you know exactly what you’re doing (i.e. you know about “bad neighborhoods,” the “nofollow” attribute, PageRank, JavaScript-ads vs text links, what it means to get googleaxed and so on).

• Don’t create multiple pages with exactly the same content.

• Don’t let others people “litter” URLs on your site; if you have a web forum, keep it spam-free.

• Don’t “litter” your URL on other people’s sites.

• Don’t invest in a cheap server that won’t be able to cope with your traffic; don’t build your whole site on free website tools only – if you want to have a high-quality site & server, you need to pay for it.

• Don’t worry about a page’s meta descriptions, meta keywords and such; your time is better spent creating content.

• Don’t use tools that automatically submit your site’s URL to directories, search engines and such.

• Don’t present different content to search engines than you present to users; for example, don’t hide your text to visitors and show it to search engines.

• Don’t “over-optimize"; relax, if search engines required webmasters to heavily optimize, they’d be doing a very bad job.

• In general, don’t try to outsmart search engines (unless perhaps you intend to dedicate your life to that task); those maintaining search engines are paid to outsmart webmaster tricks, so in the long run, chances for successful tricks are low.

You can read the basics of Search engine Optimization at Google Blogoscoped.