SEO is a critical ongoing struggle that most businesses face when starting their businesses.  We all have the common goal of getting the best ranking (especially on Google) and will do almost anything to get there.  However there are some techniques that can actually be detrimental to your site.  Sometimes the optimum way to know what the best optimization techniques are is to know what you absolutely must avoid.  The following are the 5 top techniques to AVOID when optimizing your site:

1. Invisible keywords embedded on page:  i.e. keyword spamming.  Basically it’s using text that is the same color as the background of a site to increase the instances of targeted search terms thus resulting in higher ranking.  Sounds like a good idea?? 

 Well not really! Actually keyword spamming tends to annoy users when they pull up your site and find that there are not actually relevant terms to what they were searching.  Also, search engines have recognized this as a problem and have begun to search for this and penalize sites that use this technique by dropping them from their database. 

So although this may seem like a great, low-cost way to “optimize” your site, it’s not and will inevitably have a negative effect on you.

2. Repeating keywords excessively:  Another one of those low cost tricks that deal with keywords.  This is pretty self-explanatory, using a keyword excessively on the site to increase relevance rating.  There are a couple of ways to do this: consistently repeat a phrase in the content or META tags, which could be used by including the keywords repetitively using invisible text. Also, some sites go to the extreme and actually hire copywriters to replace instances of pronouns in otherwise good site copy to get the maximum repetition of the key terms.   

I understand the desperation that sites go through to try to optimize their sites, however this again will come back and haunt you when caught and have an extremely negative effect on your site.  Directory editors can ban your site from a directory if an they notice. 

Additionally, packing the copy with excessive repetition will hurt the page and make your site difficult to read and understand.  Finally, Google specifically and other search engines now have filters that screen for overly repeated keywords which again will result in penalty.  Remember, well-written copy is much more attractive to a reader and will result in higher conversion rates.

3. Link Farms: These are pages that consist solely of links to other pages but do not provide any useful content.  This is a method used to boost linking popularity which again leads to increased ranking on search engine sites.  The negative effect of this is that site viewers find a page that is filled with links unrelated to your actual site content very unappealing.  Additionally the major search engine sites are again noticing these patterns with sites and penalizing the ranking as a result.    A page of links can be OK, but only when the links are relative to the content in your site.

4. Over-submitting your site to search engines:  Another self-explanatory one; this is continuing to submit your site to crawlers on a specific schedule (i.e. every day/week/2weeks) even though the crawler has already indexed your site.  It may seem like a logical idea, the more you submit the better.  However submitting multiple times results in a waste of your time and has no effect on your search rankings.  The majority of search engines will just delete multiple submissions and if annoyed will ignore your site completely.

5. Using untrained SEO consultants:  This is by far the worst possible thing that can be done. Although you save a few dollars in the beginning by choosing those SEO firms that are “competitively” priced, you will be spending a lot more in the long run.  Especially when you realize that you have not seen results, and you do indeed have to hire those well-trained and knowledgeable experts that will really have your site’s long term interests as their priority. 

It’s best to think of hiring professional, authentic SEO firms as an investment.  Hiring those cheaper firms may not cost you much in the beginning but what will your return on investment (ROI) be?  If they are an unethical or untrained firm they may use the above mentioned tactics where you will help you see an immediate result in your ranking.  But after a couple of weeks, or months even, when the search engine sites finally catch up with you, how detrimental would it be when after you paid for this to be done you get penalized? 

On the other hand when investing in a solid SEO firm, that will most probably be a little more highly priced, your ROI will be of your satisfaction because their techniques will help your site ranking on a long-term basis in a legitimate way.

In the end, as with most great things in life, there are no short-cuts to gaining what you most desire.  The best thing to do when trying to increase your site ranking is to follow the rules and make wise decisions rather than jumping to the one that seems most attractive at the time, especially if it’s cheap and easy!