These days it seems everyone and his brother knows how to do SEO for websites. But would you trust your website’s reputation and search engine ranking to just anyone? We didn’t think so!
There is only one source to trust for your guidelines and tips about SEO and that is Google itself. The good folks at Google have written an entire guide on what to do and not do.
We urge all webmasters or individuals involved in SEO to read said guide so they can be abreast of what to do and not do. While not a substitute by any means we will list out some points that should be avoided for your convenience:
1) Duplicate meta tags (some people put two meta descriptions or titles)
2) Making a page’s heading an image and then putting hidden H1 text underneath the image
3) Multiple H1 tags on a page
4) Navigation menus that are all Javascript and not visible to search engines
5) Putting the same text on more than one page. Meaning, don’t use the same text, always keep your text unique. This is called ‘duplicate content’ and is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Also avoid duplicate title tags.
6) Keyword stuffing. Be it in the text of the page, meta tags, alt attributes, title attributes, H tags
7) Purchase Youtube views, Twitter followers or Facebook likes. That is a violation of the terms of service and can result in your account being closed.
8) Purchase links to your site. Google can detect this and subsequently penalize your website.
9) Canonical URL Issue
10) Renaming web pages and not doing a 301 redirect to them so the search engines can find it. If you just rename page your old page will loose all of its reputation in the search engines. You want your new page to get all of that reputation, so you must do a 301 redirect in your server’s .htaccess file.
This list isn’t by any means exhaustive but covers some of the main points. We will continue these points in Part Two of SEO Dont’s
If any of your websites have these or you are unsure if they do, contact us and we can help you!
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