10 Ways to Mess Up Your SEO
I see it and hear it all the time. I speak with potential clients that claim everything was going great and then all of a sudden everything hit the fan. Rankings gone, traffic gone and business down.
Here are 10 ways to royally mess up your SEO:
1. Not asking enough questions
When you hire a search engine optimization company make sure to ask questions on process. Find out to make sure there are no black hat methods being used.
2. Dangerous Linking
A link is good but not everywhere. Linking to the wrong types of websites could land you in the hot seat very quickly. For instance, always strive to have relevant incoming links that could generate visitors to your website, not just a link for the sake of a link.
3. Forgetting to read guidelines
The search engines have strict guidelines they like all websites to follow. Does that mean that some things slip through the cracks? Yes but not for ever. Read through the search engine guidelines to understand what type of approach they like to see.
4. Black hat tricks
Don’t fall prey to cutting corners on your search engine optimization because you could find yourself in a heap of trouble. You may get some sort of search engine penalty, if you do by accident fix it. If the black hat technique was not by accident, then please stop reading this list now!
5. Having disgusting URL structures
Many times people forget to remember about their structure of their URL’s on their website. Don’t forget to keep them as clean as possible.
6. Blanketed meta info
Your meta info for each page should always be nice and unique. Blanketing the same meta title tag across the board is not going to help you long term.
7. Not enough good content
Search spiders are readers not thinkers. If you don’t have enough text they will simply skip over your website. Always have some text for them to grab onto, but always focus on the visitor experience of your site and create good quality content for your visitors.
8. Not enough link building
Link building is something that should be occurring every single month without question. Link building is what gives a website that power it needs to really start climbing through the search results.
9. Image tags
Don’t forget that there is an opportunity to show up in image search on all three search engines and your images need to be optimized for this opportunity.
10. Not using a keyword research tool
You really don’t want to sit there and try to come up with keywords yourself without using a tool because I can guarantee you will not see any search engine optimization benefits. Use a keyword research tool, such as the Google keyword research tool.
These to me are some of the more important areas to watch out for when conducting search engine optimization otherwise you could find yourself going backwards.
15 Responses to “10 Ways to Mess Up Your SEO”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Really great post here. I have a few questions if I may. Getting profile links from irrelevant forums will hurt your rankings? How much link building do you recommend a month? This would be for new and used domains. Thanks.
Hi SkiHighMarketing,
Thanks for reading!
Having irrelevant links to your website, may hurt but it depends on the trust factor that you website currently has and if you have a balanced type of link building strategy. Either way, I would not recommend building any non-relevant links to your website.
To answer your other question, it really depends how many links you should build on a monthly basis. I would first conduct a link audit to see your starting point and also conduct a link audit of your top 3 competitors and then map out a link building strategy. The key is to keep things white hat as you build your relevant one way links to your website, by not overdoing it (not building 1000 links in a month, but naturally building links through promotion, etc.)
I hope this helps.
Thanks again for reading!
Nick
Above point give for optimizing a website is very useful for those who are unaware about SEO techniques. Such type of people will get knowledge from this post.
Really Nick Stamoulis has given great tips for SEO
Thanks for the article. I would have to agree that link building can be a way to make or break your SEO. I recently had an idea for link building, and I’d be interested in hearing your expertise on the idea.
Basically, there are plenty of blog spammers who automate everything. I think that this is dumb, annoying, and dangerous. However, I think it is possible to work off of their successes and failures.
I have been using OSE (open site explorer) to find the backlinks of these spammers. (Note: I only look at sites who have a good PR and decent rankings, so they aren’t blacklisted.)
Then, I look at the links that have good anchor texts from quality domains (metrics: mR, mT, domain authority, PR).
If the site has all of these characteristics and is relevant to the content I am targeting, I provide a meaningful comment with a link. I am cautious not to have all the same anchor texts, and I don’t add a ton of links at once.
Is this a viable strategy? Albeit, it is a little grey hat, but I think it can be a legit strategy to build links.
Sorry for the lengthy post. :-p I enjoy your blog, and I must say that I definitely prefer building links naturally.
I would like to add that over optimizing can also be a bad thing for your SEO campaign. Changing things around too often like page titles and meta tag info can work against you. Have faith and the search engines will eventually pick up on your tags. Make sure they are good from the begining.
You don’t want to rank highly for non descriptive words such as “click here” or “read more”.
Thanks Nick for the post, it’s really great. I have a question re link building. As far as I know nofollow links from forums and blog comments don’t add any value to your website. Do you have any advice what sourses are good for having links from them?
Nick,
This is great! Thank you for the info! What other keyword research tools do you suggest besides Google AdWords?
Thanks!
You had mentioned a great tips here and specially about links from the relevant websites. People often build links with irrelevant websites for purpose of getting backlink but they don’t think about their future ranking.
Hi Jared,
Thanks for reading and sharing this approach to SEO link building…
Honestly, it sounds like a labor intensive approach to researching blogs to comment on. It sounds like it could work, but it seems that it is too much effort to find a good relevant blog posts to comment on. I always recommend the typical places to find good quality blogs: Google blog search, blog catalog, and industry lists that might exist.
Hope this helps & thanks for reading!
Nick
Yes it does. i guess the blog links that I was referring to in the above post were “followed” blog comment links.
BTW, thanks for the Constant Contact webinar today!
I always try and do a bit of seo at the end of everyday and I think its working as I hit new visitor records every month.
Not having a good link structure within your site also has consequences and will keep your site from being indexed too .
What would a clean URL structure look like? How does one go about cleaning up the link structure ?
Hi Lindsey,
Thanks for reading!
It really depends on your website, but generally not having really long keyword stuffed URLs is good (this tends to be spammy and not work well).
Thanks!
Nick