Leave Four Bad SEO Habits in 2008

As we leave behind 2008, there are some SEO habits we need to shed as well! These used to work, but now are going by the wayside as the search engines readjust and refine to keep webmasters from taking advantage of loopholes. What used to

be cutting edge and innovative becomes sluggish and non-responsive.

1. Keyword Stuffing. Stop stuffing keywords! As Google and others start paying attention to things like how often your visitors skip away after landing at your site, bad content is no longer going to cut it. Google in particular isn’t weighting anything in your favor, even for meta tags, headers or keywords, so just quit already. High quality landing pages are where the focus needs to be.

2. Article Spinning. Hailed last year as the supreme way to get links, this is falling out of favor as well. Writing an article with nine paragraphs three times and using a software to mix and match all twenty-seven paragraphs in all possible permutations in order to submit to hundreds of article databases might get you links, but their quality is dubious to say the least. It’s only a matter of time until this is labeled ‘article spamming’. In no alternate reality can this be considered ‘original content’.

3. Linking for links alone. Don’t waste your time running around insanely looking for links that could potentially harm you! PageRank is on the decline, and Google is bound to realize sooner or later that no-follow is becoming the name of the game. Better one really good high quality link than a dozen bad ones! Double your results by obtaining links that not only boost your profile with Google, but bring you actual traffic as well!

4. Overloading your homepage. You can make your home page six screens long and optimized for bear – but if it takes too long to load you’ve not only damaged your Quality Score but you’ve turned off potential visitors. Not everyone has fiber-optic internet yet! Google also feels that making visitors wait an insanely long time is not a good practice and will count off for it when it comes to your ad prices as well as possibly hurting your ranking.

This doesn’t even touch on so called black hat practices – all of these are methods that were touted to be the best way to improve rankings!

Tomorrow: Looking Forward – The Future of SEO in 2009