In this final blog of the series, the common SEO pitfalls discussed are headed ‘Sloppy or lazy work and bad manners’.

They are titled like so because:

1. They lack any of the misdirected but honest efforts of poor website design and structure
2. They lack the intelligence and, some would say, courage (albeit misplaced) of black hat trickery
3. They involve activities that only serve to impose upon, compromise or irritate other users.

Possibly the most heinous of all things in this category is deliberate stuffing of alt tags. Consider this: the purpose of alt tags is to help blind people by describing images and navigational tools to blind people. Stuffing Alt Tags full of keywords renders them both completely useless and confusing to the very group of people they are intended to help. Not only that, but since most search engines ignore alt tags it is a complete waste of time.

In terms of bad manners, spamming forums and comment spam (in blogs and on guest books) must come high up on most users’ lists. Using comments to link back to a site – covertly or not – is regarded as spam in the first instance, and secondly, totally disregarded as both search engines and humans pick up on it and treat it as such.

Spamming forums can take the form of website ads disguised as editorials. Once again, both users and spiders can recognise this and will dismiss it. For improved SEO, website owners are better off forging relationships on forums and becoming a helpful presence – a more effective way of attracting visitors to their site in the short and long term.

Newcomers to search engine optimisation regard links as a quick and easy way to improve results listings. This is rarely the case. Purchasing links is seen as black hat, while free link exchanges don’t fool the search engine spiders. Genuine links to good quality sites that are relevant to yours are beneficial as long as they only make up a small amount of your link profile. Similarly, for better search engine optimisation, link farms should be avoided.

For obvious reasons, linking to a website using black hat SEO tactics is foolish – if and when that website is banned, chances are that your linked site will be banned too.

The importance of good quality content in search engine optimization cannot be highlighted enough. Sites that use automated content generation (by lifting scraps from the Internet and combining it with random articles to create web pages) don’t understand this.

Both search engine spiders and visitors will be drawn to sites with relevant, useful and keyword rich copy that is easy to understand and backed by good navigation. It’s essential that the fundamentals of Good Copywriting are followed – even more so given the speed in which users can click away from a site. Some easy ways to incorporate good content in a site, other than in text, are: creating a glossary, drawing up a list of FAQs, finding testimonials, writing how to articles and creating press releases.

Ignoring these common pitfalls can lead to your site being itself ignored – by the search engines and the visitors that you are trying so hard to attract.

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