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While there are a lot of things you SHOULD do regarding your SEO efforts, there are also plenty of things you should NOT do as well. The Internet is rampant with advice; both good and bad and it is up to you to determine whether or not the advice is worth taking. The problem is that a lot of advice, regardless of what topic you’re talking about, is not exactly perfect and when it comes to SEO, well, just say that advice is all over the place, from the good and the bad to the downright ugly.

Here are some things that you should NEVER be doing on your website; I don’t care if it came from some self-proclaimed guru who charges thousands of dollars a month. If you don’t believe me, then just try these on your site and watch the negative implications that will happen. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

One of the biggest mistakes people make, first and foremost is not realizing that SEO is an ever-changing entity. What worked three years ago, may not work today. Case in point: meta tags. It used to be that all you needed to do was put your keywords within your keyword meta tag and the search engines would find you, believe you to be relevant, and rank you accordingly.

Today, you’re lucky to get a glance from a popular search engine at your meta tags.

Another method that is still used by websites today (most likely sitting in the back of the pack or, worse yet, not even indexed at all), is that of the “hidden link”. When you link to another site, you essentially give that other site a “vote of confidence”. This is still fine (within reason) but where the problem arises, is when you hide that link. I still can’t believe that to this day, hidden links are suggested to those who want to do legitimate SEO. When you have a link on your site that is the same color as the background of your site, meaning that regular humans can’t read it with their eyes but search engines can, you’ve just stumbled across a way to get your website penalized.

Another piece of advice that tends to find its way onto unbeknownst website owners sites is that of the pixel. This is a simple 1×1 pixel located on a site that contains a link. Fancier than the hidden link above but still against the rules.

Never, ever hide a link on your site.

Second, don’t create a doorway page. If you don’t know what the heck a doorway page is then if anything, read up on it so that you’re educated. Doorway pages are web pages created strictly for the purpose of housing keywords. The search engines see this prior to coming to your site, and once again, your visitors never even know it is there.

Third, exchanging links with anyone and everyone. It is important that you do exchange links yes, but it should only constitute a minority (less than 50%) of the overall links on your site. And above all, when you do decide to trade links with someone, make absolutely certain that the site you’re linking to is A) on a related topic as your site and B) actually offers up some value to your website visitors.

I personally am very, very, very picky about who I link to with all of my websites. If I look at your site and it’s poorly constructed, has ads all over the place, limited information and is just downright meant to do nothing for someone, then you’re booted. I’ve even run across sites that look very nice on the outside but when you click on one of their “interior” links are then taken to a different website all together. Nice try buddy, but no way am I even glancing your direction

Fourth, duplicate content. A LOT has been talked about this of late because there are two sides to each story. One group says that duplicate content penalties don’t exist because if that were true, then CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, etc., would all be penalized for showing the same Associated Press content on each of their sites.

While technically this is true (there are so many other factors that go into it), here are some things to consider.

First, a LOT of people get their content from eZine directories - these house articles that other people have written that you too can use on your site. If there are a lot of people who use the same article, one group says that you’ll get penalized by the search engines and the other group says that it doesn’t matter, all that matters is that you don’t have the same content on YOUR site.

I personally don’t use a lot of ezine articles myself, every so often I’ll find a really great one that I can’t resist but just like your links, balance it out. If you place one ezine article on your site then write two more of your own that are completely unique.

These are just a few things to avoid. My suggestion to you is that if you are considering implementing ANY kind of technique, REGARDLESS of who it came from, check the rules of each search engine. They don’t keep this kind of stuff secret you know.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Yahoo’s Webmaster Guidelines
MSN’s Guidelines

Search engine optimization is one of the best ways you can use to get your website ranked highly in the search engines. To get the most out of your efforts, you need a well optimized site that will bring in lots of visitors for you but if you’ve ever taken the time to check out the prices of some of the larger SEO firms, the costs can range in the thousands of dollars.

Thankfully you can get information about how to optimize your website yourself from many places on the Internet, one of them right here at SlingBrain.com. Here’s a few that can get you started right away. (For free I might add).

1. Exchanging Links. While this used to be a big favorite amongst a lot of online marketers, it’s not as important as it used to be thanks to some well-known search engines penalizing sites that went over the top with this technique. That being said, there are still benefits to exchanging links with other websites in order to help your page ranking. You just need to follow a few guidelines first.

First, be sure that the website you want to exchange links with hasn’t been barred by the search engines. You’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple but very important step. You can do this by heading over to Google and in the address bar entering site:www.thesiteyourconsidering.com. If nothing shows up, they’ve been blacklisted so don’t even think of trading links with them. You’ll go downhill faster than a snowball on ice.

Second, be sure that the website you’re exchanging links with is on a related topic as yours. You don’t want to trade links with a site about Pizza if your site is about flowers.

Third, keep the link trading at a minimum. Be sure you’ve got some natural incoming links as well that aren’t requiring a link back to you. You need to keep the two balanced out.

Fourth, be sure that the page you want to link to has a PageRank. Obviously the higher the better, but any kind of PageRank means that they’ve been around for some time; at least long enough for Google to know that they’re online.

Fifth, don’t be shy. Find out who is listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo and simply ask if they’d be willing to exchange links with you. I don’t recommend you doing this until you’ve had your site up for quite some time, and have plenty of good, relevant content on it. You don’t want to be spamming these sites either. Send a simple and polite request to the webmaster, if they don’t respond in a week or so, then wait and do it again in another month.

I had to share a story with you today because I know this is happening to a lot of unwary webmasters all of the time.This is something that happened to one of my clients last week and after consulting with him, I realized that this information really needs to be shared more often than it is.
Now, working in the SEO world, I know that there are quite a few unscrupulous companies out there who try to earn your business by implementing what I call a “confusion” technique.Let me elaborate with my client’s story…

They had registered a domain name a couple of years ago and had created their website on their own. They came to me for some SEO help because they were still not seeing the listing results that they liked.

As I consulted with my client, he had told me that he received a phone call from a company that will remain nameless, promising (in otherwords guaranteeing) that they could get his website in one of the top 10 positions in Google.

He asked them how they did that and they responded that by using Google AdWords you could get in the top positions of Google’s organic results.

My client was a little confused about the terminology - and thankfully he came to me before falling for this typical and widespread ploy on unwary site owners.

I explained to him that first and foremost, Google AdWords were those ads placed on the top and right-hand side of Google’s search engine results page.

If you go ahead and type in anything at all on the Google search page, you’ll see these ads readily populate along the side of the page and oftentimes on the top of the page as well.

These are ads that you pay for. Advertisers, small businesses, large businesses, they all have to pay Google a price to be listed in those positions.

The rest of the results on the page are what are called the “Organic” listings. These are the listings that legitimate SEO firms will do their darndest to get you into. Ideally on the first page and even more ideally within the top 3 positions.

These are the “free” listings. Now, obviously if you pay an SEO firm to optimize your website you don’t consider it a ‘free’ listing - but you don’t pay a price everytime someone clicks on your link like you do with Google AdWords.
In a nutshell, this particular (will remain nameless) firm was hoping that my client didn’t know the difference between being on the first page of Google in an ad or in the natural results - which he didn’t.

Thankfully he asked me first.

Never, ever, ever believe it when someone tells you that they can guarantee you a top spot on a search engine. In a little while I’ll be posting a video on this by Matt Cutts a Google software engineer that touches on this subject.

Please beware of these kinds of scam artists and remember, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.