10 Worst Moves in SEO

Learn what every good SEO company knows, by learning these 10 things to avoid in your SEO efforts.

1. Not researching your keywords/using the wrong keywords: Just because you think you know what the best keywords and phrases would be to drive traffic to your site, doesn’t mean they are the keywords and phrases people using the search engines will enter to find the product, service, or idea you are trying to sell.

2. Rampant Oversubmission: There are thousands of search engines, but only 10 of them will actually bring you any traffic. Submitting your site to the others wastes your time and, if you pay for software or a service to do it for you, your money too. Most of these “lesser” search engines are FFAs or Free For Alls that could actually harm your rankings with the big 10.

3. Premature Oversubmission: This refers to submitting your site/pages/docs to the search engines too frequently and too soon in the site’s or pages’ development, which are both big no-nos.

4. Image-Only Headings: When it comes to headings, a caption added to your pictorial heading is worth a thousand images.

5. Not making use of the Title Tag: Not only is this bad for the obvious reason that it wastes an opportunity to make use of a keyword, but it’s the title tag that shows up as the title of your page in your search result, and if there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there.

6. Flash websites with no HTML alternative: Flash sites are bulky and sometimes slow to load, not to mention some people don’t have Flash and don’t want to download and install it. So if you don’t have an HTML alternative to your page, you lose all that traffic.

7. Spamming backlinks: Don’t do it. If you don’t know what it is, don’t learn.

8. Overusing keywords: Or any SEO techniques, for that matter. Think Goldilocks—too little is not enough, too much is…well, too much. But moderation is just right.

9. Lame URL: Lame URLs are just plain lame. Take some time to come up with a good URL that’s catchy to visitors and sticky to search engines.

10. Ignoring the value of hiring a quality SEO company to help you succeed.