Just Say No To Your Bad SEO

bad seo

With so many people making common mistakes on their SEO tactics, I thought I’d cover a few errors that people have actually asked me before and how to avoid them.

‘The more content you have the better you do.’

Sure, that can be true as Google likes new content … however – it is worth noting that new content doesn’t mean paying a company based in the middle of nowhere to mass-spin existing articles of yours and then dumping them all on your site.

One unfortunate such website was recently hit in the Panda updates, when he discovered that having over 1000 articles with structural and grammatical errors akin to a 4 year old, doesn’t exactly win Google’s affection. With that in mind – lots of content is great, just write it yourself or use someone with a reasonable coherency in the language of your choice.

‘Facebook will help my ranking.’

Again this is true but in context; building natural fans and likes from people with similar interests is a good move, but buying 1,000 likes for £5 off eBay with 99% of them coming from some random bloke in Timbuktu when you are a UK company, isn’t very valuable at all. Also, do note that spamming your friends senseless with marketing information is fine (although they might de-friend you), but adding random people and then spamming them with unsolicited messages is also not a great way to start your SEO/SEM strategy.

‘Sell, Sell and Sell some more.’

Of course you want to make money from your site or blog, but what you don’t want to do is annoy Google in doing so. Remember that mass advertising and/or low quality content is considered spamming by Google and will be dropped down the rankings.

‘Backlinks are always good – get as many as you can.’

Of course this is right, but only a few backlinks will ever do what you want them to do. You need to take time to research where you are buying links or commissioning links from – otherwise you may fall into the obvious pitfalls. Don’t buy from linking farms, don’t pay over the odds for them – generally people who ‘guarantee’ you thousands of links for £50 aren’t going to do very well for you; and don’t just buy them and leave them – keep checking the link is still active, your keyword is still there and that the site hasn’t suddenly allowed a hundred more people to come in and buy links on the same page.

So there you have it, keeping it short and sweet to bring in the New Year, remember to stick to the advice that you read here and you should be on the right track to start 2012. Best of luck people and Happy New Year!

This has been a guest post from Daniel Laming who is the webmaster for the online casino website Big Gains No Pains.