Tuesday, January 11, 2011

How to Kill Your SEO Juice and Suck the Life Out of Your Website

greencine.com
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the backbone of getting visitors to your site and turning them into clients, customers or regular readers of your blog. Like I've said before on this blog there really isn't a magic formula that will garner guaranteed results, but there are some basics that every site owner should know and practice. But sometimes knowing what NOT to do is as important as knowing what you should do. Here is a tongue in cheek list of practices that guarantee to kill your SEO juice and suck the life right out of your page rank. (If I offend anyone...too bad you shouldn't be doing these things anyway!)
  • Have crappy content. Copy and paste from other sites, in other words steal content and post it as your own. Never mind that Google will flag your site as a dupe and kill your page rank, go right ahead and do it if you're too lazy to write your own or too cheap to pay a writer to do it for you.
  • Don't worry if your links work. Never test them and don't be concerned if they lead to completely unrelated sites. 
  • Stuff your pages with keywords. Write your content around your keywords and make sure you get as many as you can in there. So what if it doesn't make any sense, no one reads your content anyway and you're just writing for the search engines.
  • Make your site as hard to navigate as you can. Keep your navigation a mystery. Everyone likes a maze right? If you visitors get lost it will just expose them to more of your pages.
  • Spam forums and comments. Post totally unrelated comments and have as many links as you can in your comments and forum posts. Copy and paste a form-letter type comment on all the blogs and forums that you find. 
  • Use Black Hat SEO. Use hidden text, misleading links, have one link for the search engine spiders and one for real people. 
These are just a few things to do if you want to kill your SEO juice. Don't be fooled into thinking that you can cut corners. Black Hat SEO may give you immediate results, but these results won't last and you'll end up killing your page rank or getting your site banned completely from the search engine's databases. A few posts ago I said that if that happens, you might as well be singing in a windstorm - no body is going to hear you. Real SEO does take time and diligence. Anyone who promises quick results doesn't know their facts. To be sure that you aren't doing anything that is going to hurt your site, get a free consultation from the experts at The Cutting Edge Pros. They offer complete SEO packages and can tailor one just for your site and budget.

1 comment:

  1. Hey,

    I agree with what your saying on here. All is good advice but I think I got an ouchy from (you shouldn't be on here anyway if... lol).

    A lot of good sound advice though. Keep the facts coming. They really help.

    ReplyDelete