What SEO tactics you should avoid in 2011

2011 brings excitement in all of us and we all have SEO techniques in mind we want to try this year. Some of these techniques, however, won’t help at all or in the worst case scenario will get you a penalty and you will regret even thinking about using them. If you have already prepared a list with the things you want to try this year, feel free to cross the following tactics off in case you don’t want to waste your time.

1. Don’t hide stuff

   Hiding different things on your web pages is practically useless. Many people try different techniques in order to hide keywords from the visitors but still leave those keywords visible to the different search engines. Some of these tactics are using white text on white background or generally using the same color for keywords and background, using CSS or an image to hide the text, writing the keywords (or just linking) with a very small font and using a tiny character like a comma or a dot to link from. Using these techniques will give a little boost which will not be permanent but in most of the case it will give you a penalty.

2. Stuffing keywords

   This is another mistake that some of the people make. Trying to use more keywords than usual even without hiding them is not very smart. For example, a big mistake you can make is to use the Title Tag of your website to list various keywords. Also a big waste of time is to use the Meta keywords tag. Avoid those tactics if you want to save some of your time.

3. Link Schemes

   Link schemes are a part of SEO that the search engines don’t like very much. That includes any kind of link farms, link wheels, two-, three- or four-way linking. You should also be careful with link exchange.

4. Spam

   Please, for your own good, try to avoid spamming. Especially the comment spamming. Writing a comment on a certain blog just so you can get a link from it is considered spam and still a lot of people do it nowadays. Most of the times this comment won’t even make it to the blog thanks to the filters so you should really save your time. Also, making sub-domains and linking to yourself is a bad idea.

5. More tips

   There are a lot of things you should avoid and I think I’ve covered most of them here. Some others you should not do are: using the PageRank to measure the success and strength of your website, stop doing SEO on pages that are ranking well, pay money to submit automatically to thousands of directories.

Please try to avoid these horrible SEO tactics during the New Year and start it good with some great techniques. If you are doing everything the right way and if you stay away from the useless and harmful tactics, you should be enjoying great results very soon. However, you can always advice on search engine optimisation from professionals (interesting, but little known fact is that in Danish the term is Rådgivning på søgemaskineoptimering).