When it comes to SEO there are so many positive and beneficial options available to you and yet so many people try to cheat their way out of it by doing unethical practices or trying to be “cheap” about the whole process. Listen, if SEO was easy, everyone would be doing it. It’s not easy. Its hard work, you have to be knowledgeable about what you’re doing and you have to be doing a few different practices in order to really make a differences. Yet people think they can do some really awful practices and techniques and it will help them and their website out. Wrong! If you really don’t feel like doing SEO for your website by yourself, do yourself a favor and hire a top SEO firm that can do it all for you. It’s not cheap, you won’t be spending a dollar for their service, but it’s going to be worth it because it will be done by an expert that is knowledgeable and ethical. Here are a few ways you might be screwing your website up.
Buying Links
Yes, you can buy links. No, it’s not healthy for your website. In fact, it could really ruin your rank. Sites like BuyCheapLinks make you believe you are driving “thousands” of visitors to your website and doing so is a good thing. It’s not. Google can actually de-index your website or even blacklist it if they find out you are buying links – and believe it, they can. The easiest way? These cheap backlink sites all seem to use the same process and sites like BCL post every customers links on the same site or domain. Pretty easy to pick up for a multibillion dollar company like Google eh? Do yourself a favor, don’t participate in this type of behavior. Don’t ruin your rankings.
Stealing Content
On a previous article I wrote about stealing content and how lazy that is. But, it can also ruin your website. If you remember the days of article marketing, you now know that Google frowns upon duplicate content. Write your own content, make it original. Sure, you can add in copied product descriptions, biographies and such, but do not copy someone else’s work or worse – spin it. Ugh. I hate when people spin stuff, it makes it sound and look like crap! Don’t do it. Write your content or find someone who can and can do so correctly. If you have someone that took the time and money to copyright the content and you steal it, you could get into legal trouble as well as trouble with Google. Nothing good can come of stealing content.
Spamming
A very unethical and disgusting behavior. Real business owners and people that practice SEO don’t go around spamming other people’s blogs. It’s disrespectful and rude to top it all off. Just think you have a really amazing website, you got everything done down to a T. You added SEO, you wrote your content, you answer comment questions professionally and you made sure you picked out a good theme. Then comes along CheapGucciPurses and spams the heck out of your poor little blog. How annoyed are you? Think about that feeling if you ever think of spamming someone else. Definitely not cool. If you do spam enough times and enough people complain, you could have your IP blacklisted as well. Good luck with that!
Keyword Stuffing
Once you figure out your keywords, try not to overuse them. It used to be that you could get away with this, but Google has started to punish people for keyword stuffing their blogs or websites. Keyword stuffing is literally stuffing your keyword into your content – even in places it doesn’t belong. If you want your blog or website penalized, deindexed or banned, by all means stuff away! If you want to stay in good standings with search engines like Google, don’t even bother with stuffing. Beyond that, keyword stuffing sounds stupid and can turn readers away. Here is an excerpt by Matt Cutts about keyword stuffing and how they are trying to handle it: “”We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”
