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When optimizing your web site, there are many things that you should avoid if you don’t want your page to get devalued within the search engines. You’re looking to raise your status and your rank of your site, not upset the search engines by making small mistakes that can be easily remedied. If you make enough mistakes, your site could fall in its rankings or worse yet, get delisted all together within the search engines. So it is important to know what to avoid while optimizing your website for search engine rankings.

First, text in your graphics

It is often recommended that you use a descriptive term within each of your images. What I mean by that is that you place words related to the photo within your images alt tags. While this is perfectly legal, you need to be very careful when doing so. An illegal technique is to place lots and lots of keywords related to your topic within each alt tag. This is considered “keyword spamming” and is frowned upon by nearly every relevant search engine online. When you do use words within your images alt tags, use them in a way that is helpful. Typically these words and phrases are used in order to describe the image in the event the image does not load on your page. So if you’ve created a web page about “flowers” and you have multiple images on your page relating to flowers, it should specifically describe that image. For example, “flowers button image”.

Moving a page having a PR

If you decide to “fix up” or “enhance” your website, you may end up moving some high ranking web pages. These are pages that have already been indexed in the search engines and that have received a decent amount of PageRank. If you do move a page that’s already received good rankings or a high PageRank, and the search engine pays a visit, it will not be able to locate that page and it will then end up losing whatever ranking it had. Try to avoid this at all costs.

Dead ends

Every last page on your site needs a link to another page somewhere. Whether this be on your own site or to someone else’s site. You must give your site visitor a way to leave your web page if they desire. Not offering this option can be very detrimenal to your website as a whole.

Artificially increase a page’s keyword density

If you decide to follow someone who is not very well-versed in proper SEO techniques, you may inadvertently end up following some advice that will hurt you more than help you. One example is that of filling your web pages with keywords related to the topic of your site. This is considered keyword stuffing and will get you penalized and quite possibly banned when it comes to the search engines.

Using hidden text or links

Another piece of advice that might be followed by those unfamiliar with proper SEO techniques is that of hiding links from view. If you’ve ever been instructed to place text on your site that is the same color as your background, thus rendering it invisible to readers, you need to fix that right now. The search engines will penalize you for such a tactic. Additionally, you should never place an image on your site that hides a link. This too will result in penalties and possible banning in the search engines.

Links from link farms and non-relevant sites

Link farms are sites that exist online whose sole purpose is to provides links to other sites. These are also often called FFA or Free For All sites. The best when it comes to getting links to your site is to get links from places that don’t already have a lot of them.

And lastly, don’t use the same text for all of your incoming links. If all of the links that point to your site have the same link text, it sets off red flags for the search engines. Links that contain varying related terms that link to your site are best, they look more natural and thus will not be viewed as something to be concerned with when the search engines come to visit.