Sins of Search Engine Optimization
March 11, 2013
If there is one absolute truth about search engine optimization, it’s that there are no absolutes in search engine optimization.
Seriously, if you want a good mental image of what search engine optimization can be like, try to imagine that you are walking a tight rope while trying to balance a Tasmanian devil on your head. And then someone hands you a kitty. Because the internet loves kitties.
If you Google “SEO Tips,” you will find dozens of results listing hundreds of best practices to ensure your SEO success. These lists can be very useful and often offer some very good advice (a lot of those tips are covered in detail in our blog). But a lot of these lists often glaze over, or neglect entirely, the subject of what not to do. And in search engine optimization, making sure you don’t do the wrong thing can be just as important as doing the right thing.
To illustrate this point, you’ll need to forget the mental image of you, the Tasmanian devil and the kitty enjoying a bonding experience. Instead, go ahead and find one of those lists of search engine optimization tips I mentioned earlier.
Go on. I can wait.
::whistles and twiddles thumbs::
Back? If you really did have a quick perusal of any one of those lists, you will probably have seen that keywords are an essential component of SEO. If you looked at more than one list, you may have the impression that keywords are imbued with SEO Jedi-like powers and could, in fact, be the chosen ones meant to bring balance to the internet universe. If you didn’t leave this page and instead just kept on reading, well then I guess you’ll just have to trust me.
So what’s the problem?
Well, someone unfamiliar with search engine optimization could easily come away from these lists thinking that the key to SEO is keywords. Clearly, the more they have the better their rankings will be, right? It starts innocently enough, of course… But soon each page on their site has a chunk of text that is nothing but variations on the same keywords. And then it happens… Their rankings take a dive. And our inexperienced optimizer stares, forlorn, at the keywords that have betrayed them.
Source: tumblr
Keywords stuffing is just one of many sins that I will be getting into in much more detail in my new blog series: The Seven Deadly Sins of Search Engine Optimization. In this series, I am going to investigate what is bad for your SEO campaign, why it is bad and what you should do instead.
I will begin with Gluttony: Stuffing Your Site with Keywords. So join me next week; same SEO time, same SEO channel.
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Christine Martindale is one of the Account Managers at SEOhaus. If you would like to stay up-to-date on all of the latest SEO industry news and tips, you can subscribe to our blog here. Thanks for reading the SEOhaus blog!