subject: How NOT to SEO your site [print this page] How NOT to SEO your site How NOT to SEO your site
Sometimes you can try too hard. You so desperately want to succeed that in covering every angle, turning over every stone or going that extra mile you've inadvertently pushed it too far. You've crossed that invisible line between ambitious and desperate, and in the process undermined your efforts. Desperate is a turn off to prospective clients, would be employers, tall, dark and handsome Venezuelans and especially to Google.
It's not that you have tried to bend the rules to breaking point or been a little sneaky that things fall apart. It's because you kind of care too much.
There's nothing wrong with wanting top search placements. It's only natural that you want to scoop up all that delicious traffic and convert it onto online profits. Even better, you can do that at the expense of the competition - a splendid win win. The trick though is to conceal your drive. To play it down.
The school of SEO cool says:
Don't rush out and buy links
Two reasons. The first is that Google hates, absolutely hates, the concept of link juice being bought as opposed to earned. Links are the defining signal that Google uses to evaluate the relevance and worth of a site. They're endorsements of quality from other sites that Google regards as votes of confidence. Thousands of incoming links from low grade sites screams 'gaming'. It's unnatural and you will suffer the search positioning consequences sooner or later.
The second reason that you shouldn't buy links is that it distracts you from the important job in hand. From concentrating your efforts on earning genuine, high quality links by building your web presence on great content and healthy happy relationships with other sites in your neighbourhood. For example links from editorials or reviews on reputable sites are incredibly powerful endorsements.
Keyword abuse
Trying to cram as many keywords as possible into your title tags, your description tags, your header tags, your internal link anchor text and your body copy, isn't advised. Again, it simply isn't natural. Neither users nor search engines find this attractive. Both will penalise you users by bouncing and not linking to you and engines by sinking your site down the rankings.
In reality, especially in the more competitive marketplaces, we're talking fine lines though the fundamental advice is - be good and be natural to be popular.
