As with most things in life, knowing what should be done in any given situation is only any good if you remember not to shoot yourself in the foot mid-way. In this post I will make a top 10 list of things you should absolutely never do with your website where SEO is concerned. Whilst this list is in no way complete, it surely contains very important points that could well save your bacon site from being looked down upon by the major search engines.

Blank or default Titles

As I mentioned in a previous post ‘Title Meta Tags‘ are one of the single most important elements on your web page when trying to rank for your key terms and so leaving them blank or having many pages with the same titles will hurt you. Keep them short and make them all unique.

Using other website’s Copy

As important as it is to have a wealth of content n your website, it is by no means advisable, for a multitude of reasons, to copy content from other websites . Not only do you risk a very nasty e-mail or phone call from the original content provider but the search engines can easily spot duplicate content. The rarer something is, the more valuable it becomes.

Hidden Text

Again, we want lots of keyword rich, unique content and sometimes you may find it difficult to fit the bill; do not be tempted to hide any of your pages’ content thinking that the search engines will not notice that the background colour is the same as the text colour for example. If the search engines see something than that which a human sees, you WILL be penalised for it and perhaps even excluded from their SERPs altogether.

JavaScript & Flash

Search engines don’t read JavaScript well and whilst they are trying to get to grips with reading content embedded in JavaScript and Flash, it is still in no way as accessible as plain text. Wherever and whenever possible use plain HTML and avoid unnecessary scripts or Flash/images where any important information lies.

Outbound Links

Just because someone has asked you to link to them does not mean you should. Be particular about the kind of links you give away and only link to those websites you deem would be valuble to your visitors. I would also recommend not having more outgoing links than you have incoming, this one should be pretty self-explanatory.

Inbound Links

Whilst it is true that having lots of incoming links is a good thing in general, it is also true to say that quality is better than quantity. Don’t go out there and do something silly like buying 500 links to your website, especially if you are not familiar with the company who will be acquiring the links for you. Google frowns upon link trading and although they may never find out, you are still at the mercy of the websites from which are linking to you. If you acquire too many links from dodgy/questionable websites, your rankings will go to pot drop.

Search Engine Submissions

Do not submit your website to Google, Yahoo and Live, there really is no need. Any website that relies on being listed due to a submission will never rank well anyway. Just get at least 1 link from a half decent website out there and the search engines will do the rest.

Page Addresses & Directory Structure/Architecture

For the simple reason that you want to avoid duplicate content and missing files when Google et Al spiders your site, you do not want to mess with your Directory Structure or Filenames unless you absolutely must. Good planing from the start is necessary in order to avoid this pitfall.

Hyphenated Domain Names

Avoid buying a domain name with more than 1 or 2 hyphens ‘-’ in it. A great number of spammy sites and link farms use such domain names and you will therefore look more like such a website. If possible, always buy the domain name shortest, and with the least hyphens in it.

Domain canonicalization and index

Make sure that your domain name only resolves to one location. For example: mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.com are 2 different sites. Ensure that whichever you do not choose to be the main location is redirected to the chosen location. Also, make sure that your homepage is the same throughout your website. In other words you do not have links to mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html. The search engines see these as 2 different pages with the same content and even though it will not hurt your ranking much directly because of this, you are essentially splitting your link juice 2 ways instead of allowing the 1 page to fully capitalise from all the inbound links.