As an SEO, all you want is to make search engines notice you and place you prominently in their results. But more often than not, your wait for getting higher SERPs seems never ending. In your haste, do not take the wrong way to better rankings. You have to make the engines happy and do not try to fool them. Search engines have tightened their quality control, and in the Post Panda scenario, you need to be really careful to not step out of line. Here is a list of things that you must not do, to avoid being penalized by the search engines.
Another point worth mentioning here is that you must never use keywords in your meta tags, which are not related to your site’s content. If you have a page on baby clothing, then do not stuff the meta tags with popular keywords like a celebrity name, to attract visitors.
Tip: The key here is rich quality content on your website. Use your genuine keywords in writing relevant and informative content on your pages. Give the visitors all the information they’d want to know about the baby clothing, the trends and designs, then show them how you can provide them with the best clothing at the right prices. Your page must seem genuine and informative to the users, for them to click on the “Buy” button.
Search Engines Are Not Fools: Do not think that you can sneak around with black hat techniques and the engines will not notice. So these are a complete no-no-
- Hidden text
- Hidden links
- Cloaking
- Sneaky redirects
Tip: Do not create too many doorway pages and also when submitting to search engines, you must avoid submitting too many pages at once.
Stay Away From Keyword Stuffing: Search engines are coming down very hard on spammers. That is why, you must refrain from repeating the same keyword in a row anywhere on your page. This can displease the engines, and you can be penalized or worse banned. So, do not use lists or paragraphs to of keywords, or hide them in tags. Not only doing this will lead the users away from your site, but your site’s ranking will also suffer.
Tip: Review your Website and check your rankings for multiple keywords that appear in the content in the different pages of your site. Then you will get to know which keyword gets your site a better rank as compared to the others and you can then work on the same.
Get Rid Of Duplicate Content: Post the Panda update, your biggest trap could be duplicate content. So, if you have multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with large amounts of duplicate content, then you are giving an invitation to the search engines to penalize you.
Tip: To prevent search engines from identifying duplicate content-use robots.txt to prevent engines from indexing the pages. Use 301 redirects. And get rid of similar content.
Stay Away From Link Spamming– Link farms are a big no for search engines. They want quality links and not huge numbers of them. Participating in link schemes can negatively impact your site’s ranking. Stay away from linking to manipulate rankings or links from low quality and non relevant websites. Too much reciprocal links or excessive link exchange.
Tip: Search engines now look for quality links from relevant or authority sites. If you get one way links from authority sites, then nothing like it.
To Conclude: The basic fact is this- SEO takes time, so you must adjust your expectations. Do not expect daily results, and in frustration, commit these mistakes, that can prove fatal to your site. Remember, making your site highly relevant to users and packed with informative and quality content, is the key to good ranking. You have to get visitors and keep them there. There are no short cuts in this case.
