As a small business website owner, you know how important it is to have a basic understanding of n (SEO). You also know that without an ongoing quality SEO campaign, there is little hope for a good ranking in the search engine results pages. If you’re new to SEO, the bottom line of a good campaign is to bring in as many targeted visitors as possible and to move your site up through the ranks of major search engines like Google and Bing.
Many website owners like to tackle some of the basics of SEO on their own, which is fine. However, if you are tinkering around with your site, especially as you learn new SEO techniques, you could hurt your SEO efforts if you are not careful.
Here are some of the practices that can hurt your growing SEO campaign:
Black Hat SEO
If you have implemented any unorthodox or “black hat” SEO techniques then you are already hurting your SEO efforts.
There are rules regarding industry best practices laid out in the Google Webmaster Guidelines and, although it may be common practice to stray from these rules, going too far will hurt your campaign.
When you utilize “black hat” techniques, the search engines flag your website as spam and will not index it for ranking. Common “black hat” techniques include link farming, keyword stuffing and publishing hidden content.
Overuse of Flash
Flash-based animation is incredibly popular because people prefer video over text. However, Flash animation is not recognized, nor is it indexed, by search engine spiders. If you use too much on Flash-based animation, you’re losing rank for your targeted keywords.
Misuse of Anchor Text
Anchor links are incredibly useful in an SEO campaign because they help alert your visitors that there is a different site that can help them find the information that they want. When you place anchor links within your content, you allow viewers to visit other relevant pages or websites. One of the biggest mistakes that many website owners make is that they use the wrong anchor links for their text.
Appropriate anchor text shows the search engines what the content of the page or website that the link points to is about and whether or not it is relevant to your content.
If you are new to SEO or you are making any major changes to your website that could impact your existing campaign, it is best to consult a professional SEO firm for advice.
