Performing your own SEO on your websites isn’t difficult, all the information you need to do it effectively is already available on the Internet, for free. The real difficulty is in telling the fact from the fiction. Everyone has their own ideas, some of them good, some of them not so good and some of them that will just get your site banned.
With that in mind I’d like to present a list of some of the most prominent Internet SEO myths. If you’ve done any of these on your website you can kiss your traffic goodbye.
- Buying as many domain names as you can to point at your website will help get you more traffic.
- Adding longs lists of keywords to your website will increase your rankings for those keywords.
- Hide your text from your visitors because they don’t need to see it, only search engines do – hiding your text is a good way to add content to your site without compromising your design.
- Get as many links to your website as you can, doesn’t matter where they come from. All links are good links. Try link farms and reciprocal links, get as many links as possible, as fast as you can.
- Flash sites are good for SEO. If you have a flash site you’ll have no problems ranking (come on, it still amazes me when people wonder why they don’t rank with Flash sites).
- Create lots of doorway or landing pages filled with content that redirect to your homepage. Google likes these!
- Linking to important websites improves your ranking; add a link to Google, it’s sure to help.
There you have it, what not to do. Next time I might give some tips on what you should be doing.
Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.
