Don’ts

• Keyword Stuffing

While most companies refrain from keyword stuffing, it is still the biggest no-no of SEO. In the past, people used to stuff meta tags with irrelevant key words in order to boost their rankings. If you were to do this today, you would be penalized by the search engine companies. To avoid this use keywords sparingly and don’t repeat them over and over.

• Hidden text

Another way of wrongly enhancing your ranking is to include hidden text in your web page. You can do this by making the colour of the text the same as the background. If you do this you will also be penalized.

• Don’t link to irrelevant sites

Although it is good to have various links to your site, you have to make sure that all of them are relevant. Although more links increase your rating, search engines will decrease your rating if you have irrelevant links on your site.

• Don’t use Flash where HTML will do

Although they are nice to look at, Flash based websites aren’t SEO friendly. The spiders that retrieve a website’s info can’t always read Flash content and then index it. Try to use HTML5; it’s like Flash, just better.

Dos

• Choose the right keywords

Even though they aren’t the only way of getting a higher ranking, it is still very important to use the right keywords on your site. Define the right words and then put them inside your title tags as well inside your text in the document.

• Have good content

The better your content, the more people will want to read it. So, to ensure that you rank higher, constantly update your content, especially since Google’s new Panda Update, which focuses more on sites that have been recently updated.

• Alt Attribute your images

If you put an Alt attribute on any of your images, this will greatly enhance any search engine’s chance of noticing your site. An alt attribute is a short description of the image you have uploaded. This can also help blind people who visit your site, as some speech programs will read the description of the image and help them identify the page they are on.

•  Use social media

The proper use of social media can greatly enhance your website’s chance of being noticed. The purpose of using social media is to build networks, and then use these networks to draw more attention to your site or blog. You must also ensure that you regularly add new content to ensure you constantly generate a buzz about your site.

(This is a post by our intern Kristian Meijer)

(Image by Danard Vincente, CC by 2.0, via Flickr)