March 11th, 2010 by Susie

Enthusiasm is great when you are getting to grips with search engine optimization for the first time, but it is nonetheless an easy thing to overdo as a beginner. Here, we explain what you need to avoid – and why.

Many of the mistakes outlined here are simply committed by non-professionals just that bit too eager to ensure that their site attains a good search engine result ranking, and as such are both understandable errors as well as easy ones to make. These techniques are, unfortunately, also regarded as unethical given spammers’ preference to ‘overdo it’ themselves in a rather more deliberate fashion. To find the highest value content for searchers, the search engines themselves therefore cannot and do not discriminate between deliberately and obliviously used unethical, or ‘black hat’ SEO techniques, and promote or penalise sites in their rankings accordingly.

The first danger that we will address is that of having too many keywords, or ‘keyword stuffing’. As the name suggests, this practice entails ‘stuffing’ or overburdening a page with keywords. Although the term is generally used to refer to deliberately ‘spammy’ strategies, it is a common error of well-meaning newcomers to overly saturate their own content. Indeed, while it is tempting to fill your content with keywords in the mistaken belief that your rankings will automatically benefit with each one, most SEO professionals actually agree that one or two keywords per paragraph is probably the optimum keyword density. Reading through your content carefully and using your intuition, you should be able to spot the obvious signs of keyword stuffing, such as prose composed of so many blatantly unnecessary keywords as to appear nonsensical to the general reader.

Another common mistake is the overuse of links, which are otherwise a vital part of any company’s SEO strategy. However, the importance of links also makes their overuse another potential activator of a search engine’s spam filter. In short, their use on your site must make sense to a human being, because if it looks like an attempt to boost your rankings instead of providing convenience for the user, then it probably will do to the search engines as well.

One other danger is that of producing too much low-value content. SEO is all about producing high value content; the higher the value, the higher your search engine results ranking. Sadly, there is no shortage of dismal content on the internet, ranging from jarring, crudely inserted keywords in an otherwise sound piece of text to utterly unreadable computer-generated content. Remember that all content needs to be of discernible value, and not just resemble a thinly disguised link farm or dumping ground for excess keywords.

Over-the-top SEO can not only penalise you in the search engine rankings but also see you thrown off the index altogether. Indeed, given the importance of subtle SEO to a good search engine ranking, if in doubt you may wish to get help from a professional search engine optimisation company rather than struggling with it on your own.

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