Site Updating 2009

 At the beginning of the year, we looked at four SEO habits to get rid of. It’s time to revisit these and see where we stand. Have you rid your site and best practices list of these habits?

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.

Have you balanced your keyword density with usefulness and value to the user? This is one of the most important things to remember and you can do yourself no good by persisting in stuffing keywords.

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’.

Articles can still be hugely valuable, but people aren’t stupid. Running into the same article over and over is pretty annoying in fact. If you write a really good article the first time around, it is good. If you spam article sites, they will only be strong links for a short time span anyway, so it is a constant loop you have to keep repeating.

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!

When you have quality links, you not only improve your PageRank and possibly your spot in the SERPs but you get higher quality traffic. Ensuring that you don’t spam blogs or forums and only try for high quality and relevance will give each link you have more weight with Google overall.

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.

Have you checked your home page and landing page load times recently? Trimming the fat can make a big diofference, and if you are savvy enough you can load slower stuff under the fold and have the main page pop up faster. It’s all about instant gratification.

If you’ve been imroving your site, congratulations – if not, why not start now?

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