Five deadly SEO sins

You want people to visit your website. You want your business or organization to come up high in Google searches. You’ll do anything to get more people to your websites. But if you do, you’ll be sorry. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) allows you to use keywords in your content that are easily searchable by sites such as Google. But there are a lot of SEO snake oil salespeople out there. Don’t buy into the hype. The only way to ensure your site’s visibility is to use organic, smart keywords and to use techniques that aren’t tricky, sneaky or offensive. On the road to good SEO, make sure you avoid the following:

1. Overstuffing

Using keywords and phrases is good. Using too many keywords or phrases is bad. You might think no one will notice if you slip extra keywords in here and there, but they will. The average reader isn’t stupid. He or she knows when you’re repeating yourself. And furthermore, if Google catches you stuffing your site with too many keywords, you could be delisted.

2. Duplicate content

This sin goes along with sin number one. Some sneaky SEO “experts” will tell you that it’s okay to repeat your content on different areas of your site. It’s not. Each piece of content on your website should be unique. Google and other search engines do enforce penalties on sites that duplicate content.

3. Flash

Flash used to seem, well, flashy and fun. Ten years ago, that is. These days, Flash is the black sheep of the internet. It’s widely considered to be outdated and bothersome. Users will always try and skip over it, and more and more devices don’t support it, resulting in error messages. Don’t build with Flash. If you do, your site will automatically become less searchable.

4. Duplicate meta info

Meta tags are little bits of information that describe your web page. Some sites have the same informative tag across the board, even when the content of each page of the site is different. This is a big, lazy mistake. You want each one of your pages to rank individually in search engine results, so your meta information should be unique, page to page.

5. Cloaked content

“Cloaking” is an online programming trick that allows search engine crawlers to see one thing on your site, while website visitors see another. For example, some companies (we won’t name names) have been known to create cloaked doorway pages filled with popular keywords, designed to drive traffic to a site. But the keywords used have no real relation to the initial word(s) being searched. Very sneaky. Very unwise. And very, very bad! Here’s the bottom line: don’t be an SEO sinner. Promote your site honestly and with integrity and the best results will follow.