SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is always of the highest importance for most businesses with a presence on the web, and rightly so; good search engine visibility and Google rankings are the backbone to success on the Internet. Sometimes however, people tend to go that step too far, either through bad advice from specialist SEO companies, or just by becoming so caught up with optimization that they neglect the core principles of web usability. Here’s five of my own SEO pet hates, that inhibit the general performance of your site more than they benefit your precious Google ranking.
Stuffing your title with keywords
The <title> element is the SEO’ers most cherished tool, as it’s the item Google takes the most notice of when crawling a web page. Including important keywords in the page title is a good move for bumping up your website rankings for your desired keywords but don’t forget what the title element is actually for – describing the page content. Some people stuff in every keyword and phrase they can think of, which ends up looking more like a Thesaurus entry than actually providing any useful information.
Remember that the title element is seen by the user when viewed in the search engine results page, so make it short, concise and enticing.
Littering your body text with keywords
It’s common SEO knowledge that if you want to rank highly for a particular search term, this term should appear as keywords in and around your page copy. This usually this happens naturally with good copy, but you can always give a helping hand and insert an extra keywords in here and there. Unfortunately many people take this way too far and drop in keywords between every other sentence. The result is page copy that either makes you sound like a robot when reading out loud, or a sufferer of some kind of obscure tourettes syndrome.
Remember to read your copy out loud, if there’s a littering of keywords and phrases in there just for SEO purposes have a tidy up to make your pages naturally easier to read.
Not using your real name on comments
Generating as many links back to your website is another crucial aspect of gaining good search engine rankings. Many people seem to think this is pretty easy, after all there’s hundreds of high pagerank blogs out there openly allowing users to submit a comment that links to your own website. All you need to do is enter your most treasured keywords instead of your real name, then you’ve got an extra backlink for the Googlebots to tally up against your website, right? Wrong. What many people don’t realise is that blog comments by default include the rel="nofollow" attribute on anchor elements, which means the bots don’t follow the link, and the pagerank isn’t passed on, meaning there’s very little SEO related benefits.
Remember to use your real name on comment forms, it will make you much more personable than ‘Cheap squirrel repellent’. Unless that is your real name of course…
Excessive interlinking of words and phrases
We’ve talked about links from other websites, but what about the all important same-site links? These is your chance to get those keyword rich links to your pages without pesky nofollow attributes getting in the way. Providing a descriptive link to another page of your site or an old article where appropriate boosts the usability of your site, making it easy for users to find information. Sometimes people go that little too far and link to every page in their sitemap whenever those words appear in the content. Any scenerio where you have almost as many colourful linked words as plain body text is never good!
Remember to provide same-site links in your content where appropriate, but don’t go overboard. You don’t need to link the words every time they appear.
Sending link exchange request emails
There’s only so many directories a person can submit to before going insane, and we’ve now learnt that comment spam doesn’t get us anywhere. How else can we get those all important back links? Why not just email the owners of other websites and ask them to link to your site, you could even reciprocate with a link in return, or offer a cash incentive. Start this email with “Dear Webmaster” for best results. As friendly website owners we all enjoy linking to our friends and sites that we frequently visit ourselves, but when 30 link request emails a day land in your inbox from sites we’ve never heard of it can get a little tedious. Accepting these requests would put you on the fast track to link farm status.
Remember to spend your time on posting quality and sought after information on your site, rather than wasting it emailing the same old link request message. You’ll see major improvements in your traffic in no time.
Good article, completely agree.
I would have to say thou, if you are not going to rank well in competitive terms you sometimes have to use "douchey" tactics to get the client as high up the rankings as possible and as many pointed out some people get poor advice and keyword stuff and do rank well
Very nice article, very informative for newbies like me. please share more information on how to set ppc campaign. i want to learn more on seo.
thanks
vivek
I’ve just got to say I cracked up laughing at this multiple times – it hits the nail on the head too.
I had a client come to me with this douche tactic on a competitor site – check the keywords at the top, in a div named ‘site phases top’…http://www.architectshampshire.com/
Had a tough conversation explaining while it may be effective, its not very user friendly and looks really crap
Soooo true, sometimes it’s so funny to read such text where every second word is "squirrel"
Any "Dear webmaster" link exchange emails I get go straight into the spam bin as plainly the sender can’t be arsed to take a look at my site. If someone’s at least made a token effort to look at it then they get a reply.
"Link exchange" is bollocks anyway. The whole point of the WWW, from its inception (which I do remember), is free linking – indeed, the WWW is the link network, not the sites themselves. If someone wants to link to my site, fine, they’re free to do so – there’s no need to ask my permission. If I want to link to someone else’s site, I’ll do it, and not ask permission.
It hadn’t occurred to me until reading this blog entry that "link exchange" emails are intended as a SEO tactic, naive that I am, so I’ll treat any future requests with even more scepticism and scorn.
great article and so true
Great article. Especially about the comments providing no SEO value. While it’s true they won’t get you ranked higher, they will send a lot of traffic to your webpage from other curious comment-readers…unless your comment adds nothing to the conversation, which a lot of the ones people pay for are.
Great post Chris! I fell about laughing at "extremely obscure tourettes" – genius!
Why do people love lists so much?
Why do people hate lists so much then?
It really irritating to promote your services/companies as the name of your comments. It just sounds so bad. Not to mention if your contents are written for the search engine, you won’t gain any interested readers.
These 5 tactics has been phased out and you need something better to have great SEO nowadays.
Nice article!
I’ve been guilty of #5 before when link exchanges were ok to do. But yeah, it does bother me when people send me emails about exchanging links these days.
Good article. The excessive interlinking of words and phrases gets really annoying.
Obsession and cut throat competition, these are the big names revolving around the heads of people who want to make cheap SEO promotions. There’s no limit they won’t cross and there’s no exploit they won’t miss. Above all this companies (MNC’s are no exception) are hiring and paying guinea pigs to do this kind of job for them…. Makes them look absolutely legit.
While developing a CMS on Drupal I mistakenly forgot to disable user registartion, so, these leeches from out of no where find the opening and put their Ad’s and Posts for Viagra and Cialis… ha hhaaaaaa….
Good thing Google has a wise but stringent policies on indexing contents, otherwise God knows what we would be searching for and where it would land us…
I really like this article.Now i will follow this tricks for my seo purpose.And specially ,i like that tricks for comment.
Nice.
-<a href="http://www.seooptimizationwebsite.com/">SEO Outsourcing</a>
Chris, one of the funniest post titles I have ever seen….and a great article.
I better check my douche meter;0
Chris-
I am enjoying your articles, I have made several Web sites in the past with moderate success on one. I have recently been hired for marketing and need all the help I can get for getting our name out there without spamming anyone.
Thanks!
Nice article. Especially the excessive interlinking. Some people just try to hard. I don’t blame them though.
These SEO-tactics really work. Nice job!
Does Google employ a rule for the amount of keyword stuffing? I would imagine it is simply keeping the keyword density on the page to around 3-4% of the visible content.
As many people have said on here SEO companies have a terrible reputation – which is why I wouldn’t ever profess to be an expert in the industry. If we all take the rule of keeping our websites clean and as though they are intended for human reading, it will serve you well.
I am aware of companies spending > £1K a month to SEO companies with no feedback or reporting on whats been done.
Interestingly someone who stopped paying their (link building) SEO company for 3 months noticed no drop in visitors and saved > £3k!
Nice article. You’ve nicely put the spotlight on the grave and common mistakes people commit to improve their page rankings.
To increase it in a proper manner, the site has to be genuine and authentic in terms of content and should not consist of stuffed keywords throughout the site.
I laughed so hard, I’ve seen this too much, especially in the small "professional" web design companies in my city.
Here in the city, squirrels get run over when they try and cross the road. I am sure that douche developers will too!
Now how about dropping a link to a search engine and back to you?
http://www.google.co.ke/#hl=en&q=SEO+extermination&aq=&aqi=&aql=&oq=SEO+extermination&gs_rfai=&fp=c5532847c7d017
Good read, thanks!
I can’t believe what a science SEO has become. I’m a Realtor trying to make a living selling homes, but so much of my time is spent studying the various effective ways of gaining page rank, traffic, backlinks, etc…
Over the years I have made some of the mistakes mention in this article. Fortunately, I’m now pretty proactive in learning about what works and what doesn’t. My latest "discovery" is the value in dofollow. Wow, what a waste of time it is to post comments on nofollow blogs. I now want to slap myself for all of that wasted effort.
A few days ago I made http://www.CallChrisToday.com a dofollow blog and already people are starting to post. The problem is you definitely have to moderate and weed out the completely unrelated comments.
One area I need to learn more about is gateway pages. Do they work? Are they considered black hat SEO?
Hey nice article. The comments are funny. I just wanted to be number 100 as well. Does that make me a bad person?
Hi. I’m a young SEO-ist and i’ve learned a lot from you in this post. Thanks.
Funny i read another article the other day that says DON’T use your real name on comments. lol. Don’t remember what their purpose was about that, prolly to be a douche when bumping your pagerank.
I do agree, if the seo is getting in the way of the true message, then the task is purposless
Good points. Spamming blog and forum comments and link farms are also bad practices.
I whole-heartedly agree with you. My full-time job has led me down the path of SEO and I find it hard to do it because I feel like SEO is equivalent to a shady used car salesman.
I’ll admit that I over-use the term "design" in my title tags. However, I can’t commit to keyword stuffing and other SEO tactics because I just feel dirty. I think that while I won’t benefit from a large traffic volume, I can rest at night knowing that I’m not fighting dirty.
PS, our former SEO "specialist" employed all of the 5 tactics. SEO-wise they work, but the content does not make sense. What do I know? I’m just a web designer!
Pretty good post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your blog posts. Any way I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon.
its really helpful..thanks..
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
bloody funny
haha, great article! I wrote about something very similar not long ago on my own blog (http://www.jaavedkhatree.com.au/wordpress/?p=326) but I think you’ve managed to be much more articulate than myself. I ‘love’ when people over-saturate their web copy with their keywords. Just smacks of desperation!
I’m an SEO and I completely agree. Keyword stuffing in Title tags is obvious and reduces usability, the same as with keyword stuffing in content (otherwise known as cannibalisation), stuffing your content with internal, useless links has very little value and is just annoying.
My personal favorite on your list is the link building emails. In January I changed domains and created an entirely new portfolio site. The old site has been down for many months and I’m still receiving emails saying "we recently visited your site and love the content blah blah blah". Quickest way I know how to get deleted.
haha this is funny … all care about fighting spam, and the spammers doesn´t know tha comment with your site name, your link and some key words do not help in the SEO rank
Some people are obsessed with seo without even knowing it.. That´s the funniest thing of all
Great article!
Nice article Chris, I’ve been leaving comments with my site name in the name field for AGES! haha I didn’t know this was bad practice. I will definitely be changing that as of NOW. thanks!
just an ordinary tips in SEO, but it’s usefull. I think if we leave comment with ‘the keyword’ name, it’s not good for comment-readability. How about the link about <a href="http://bestfreetutorial.com">best free tutorial</a> in comment message?
Great list. The photography made me smile :). Something else to consider is the domain name itself, make sure it’s a name that makes sense to your users, not just the search engines. For example, "bestgreaternewyorkaccountingfirm". Keep it sweet and simple. Make it memorable for your users.
I use my name Byrne Consulting, but I have had a few old hat advertising guys recommend staying away from using your own name in Business.
As if you stuff up or go broke a business name can change your name can’t!
Bravo, très belle pièce. Bad SEO ne mettent trop l’accent sur la densité des mots clés. Personne ne va au jeu un moteur de recherche comme ça.
or
Bravo, very nice piece. Bad SEO does place too much emphasis on keyword density. No one is going to game a search engine like that.
I have done SEO before in some websites and truly…these are the most annoying practices. Some customers have specifically asked for stuff like these and well…sometimes one doesn’t have much of a choice. These all should be banned.