The Don’ts of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a constantly expanding venture. It gets more complex than the search engines themselves, always trying to be one step ahead of its scripts, spiders and crawlers. That is why it is basically an art to master it.

However, from time to time, we all have to return to the basics. As a saying goes, “good people don’t need to be taught, they need to be reminded.” And it is like that in SEO as well.

So, without further ado, let us dive into the wonderful world of things you must never, ever do if you want to attract your site’s visitors.

1. Copying other people’s content. This one’s just bad. It might even be criminal, if the source is copyrighted, and it’s just bad taste if there’s no copyright. If that isn’t enough, search engines punish the copyists; sites with unoriginal content will rank the copycat sites much lower on their searches than the ones with actual new content.
2. Copying other people’s content… and making it as if you haven’t. If you think that you can reword an article or post (‘spinning’), think again. Search engines of today come equipped to different plagiarism checkers in order to see which contents is original and which one is spinned or plagiarized. You can already guess that tampered text doesn’t do well.
3. While the previous two don’ts had foul intent at their core, this one has carelessness. All writing software comes with some sort of a spellchecker included, and, as of recent, even web browsers show misspelled words. Remember – a misspelled word is a dead word. It won’t be registered by search engines (they also suggest correct spelling), unless the misspelling is intentional. However, if the word is commonly misspelled, you may include one instance of it in some sort of meta tag. Better to be safe than sorry.
4. Not making a keywords list. This is a common pitfall. Writing an article without a keywords list is like baking a cake without a recipe. It can work, the result will be okay, maybe even terrific, but more often than not, you risk a failure of epic proportions. This is a simple case of doing your homework. It might be annoying, but the results show quickly.
5. Not sharing your article. The last sin of laziness a web designer / article writer can do is not letting the world know about his or hers brainchild. It doesn’t need to be all that special – a simple ‘please read and comment’ post on Facebook or Twitter will do. An article not shared is an article not read.

We hope this has been of use to you in your future SEO work. If this is too much to handle, maybe you’re better off in hiring a professional SEO Canada firm to take care of all your SEO needs. The choice is yours; but don’t leave SEO behind. Your site needs it, and it needs it bad.