Top SEO tactics to avoid in 2011

2011 is now in full flow which means many companies will be looking to review their search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns. While it is important to understand the best tactics to focus on, it is just as important to understand which tactics to avoid.

The following is our list of top SEO tactics to avoid in 2011.

Keyword stuffing
Spamming a page with as many keywords as you can come up with will do you no good at all. Any content you write needs to be original and relevant. Putting loads of keywords into your content as an afterthought will just lower the quality of your content and eventually lower your ranking.
Take your time over your keyword research and choose relevant keywords and use them sensibly in the content. The golden ratio is a keyword density of 4 percent.

Hidden text
The days of filling a page with hidden text are long gone. Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other major search engines are sophisticated enough to catch you out at this. If you don’t play by the rules and you get caught out then you can wave goodbye to your rankings overnight.

Naming your homepage
As a page title is a key ranking attribute why call your home page ‘home’, what does this tell the search engines about the content on your page? Absolutely nothing is the simple answer. When you have an opportunity to give the search engines some pointers as to what will be contained on a webpage, then make the most of them. For example, if you are an electrician then perhaps it would be prudent to add a keyword that relates to the type of service you provide ‘Norwich electrician services for home and business’.

Cloaking
Trying to pull the wool over the search engines eyes is asking for trouble. Designing your website to show the viewer one thing and the search engines something else, i.e. cloaking, is strictly forbidden. It doesn’t matter how clever you think you have been with sneaky redirects and clever code, once you have been found out then you will be in trouble.

Read more / click here
This is simply wasting an opportunity to fit in a decent anchor text. It helps user and the search engines if you tell them a little bit about the type of page you are inking to. Click here / read more says nothing about the content of the page you will be taken to. Expand the text and give a clear indication of what page to expect i.e.’Click here to view our range of mobile phones’.

Link competition
Don’t get hung up on the number of links your competition has, it is the quality of links that counts. Don’t list your website on a host of spammy directories to bulk up the numbers. It doesn’t work, if anything it is only likely to have adverse affect on your page rank. Focus your efforts on getting lower volume high quality relevant links; this will pass on much more benefit to your website.