Making a list of what people do right in their search engine optimisation efforts makes for a short list, whereas all the things they do wrong makes for an endless list. So looking at the major culprits in the ‘do not do this’ list can go a long way to create effective SEO.

Senseless keyword targeting

Often people become frustrated when their SEO consultant does not agree with the keywords they have chosen to want him to optimise with. It often takes lengthy explanations to make them understand that the keywords they want will not rank well as it has no search value. Firstly, trying to rank for your brand name is a bad idea, unless you are a major brand name that is known worldwide.

The keywords to try and rank high for should have the highest possible value to searchers. You need to target the people who are looking for your type of business or service. Finding the best keywords for your website takes research, for once you have those keywords you have to research the variants of the keywords as well. The reason being is that people use synonyms and have different search patterns.

Too focussed on long tail keywords

Everyone knows that long tail keywords are not very competitive and they want to target those as they will rank easily for those. The thing no one seems to realise is that if you focus on a more competitive, high search volume keyword, the long tail keywords will automatically rank as well. If you totally target the long tail keywords you are going to put in enormous amounts of work, but only get limited searchers using them.

Medium to highly competitive keywords are more commonly used. Those are the keywords that gather long tail keywords as they go along quite naturally. This does not mean you discard long tail key phrases, but you do not want content pages stuffed with them. Sprinkle those long tailed key phrases delicately across your web pages that need more substantial terms to rank.

Do not obsess about keyword density

Too many website owners obsess endlessly about keyword density on each of their web pages. Keywords are not the beginning and ending of search engine optimisation. There is a lot more to SEO than that. There are three basics that must be addressed for good search engine ranking. There are obviously more ranking factors, but the three basics must be in place first.

These are your website’s keyword theme, the number of web pages your website comprises of and your link structure coupled with the number of valuable inbound links you have. The more web pages and the larger the number of inbound links you have, the lower drops the focus on keywords.

Too many people fixate on keywords that they neglect the other two basics and focus too much time doing on-page keyword optimisation. Instead move your focus on expanding your website and getting as many high value back links as you possibly can.

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