#5. Keyword Stuffing
This is a hot button in SEO circles. Just how many key words is too many keywords? At which point does it become spam? Funnily enough Google itself has answered this question directly!:
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What Matt Cutts is basically saying here is that modern search engines don’t actually reward unnatural “copy” anymore, and it’s been many years since they have. There is no “keyword density magic number” and we recommend just avoiding this entire philosophy.
If you have good relevant content, great on-site optimization, and are linked to from many other places — you will rank, period… and as time goes on Google & other search engines are only more and more likely to penalize any techniques that are spammy &/or seemingly like artificial manipulation of rankings.
#4. Too Focused On Title Tags, H1 Tags, and Keywords
Much more important than what you emblazon your title and header tags with is what anchor text people link back to you about.
If Google see’s your site has a gigantic title & a page title that says you’re site is about “Subject X” that’s great, but won’t necessarily help you at all. It’s far more credible and important if ten other websites link back to your article or page that’s just relevant to “subject X” but not over-stuffed with keywords about it — and the anchor text for those links mentioned the keywords “subject” and “x” so that you rank for those things.
#3. Too Much Of A Good Thing Is Bad
No matter what it is, too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing… And this is as true in SEO as it is in life. Back-links can come from directory websites, other relevant blogs, or the side bars of many link-exchanging websites; and many other places & formats. But if you have the vast majority of them all from one place, they lose all of their credibility & thus “link juice”. You need to have a diverse, balanced, and natural looking link profile — that is, many different types of links from many different types of domains with many different page ranks, anchor texts, and placement; otherwise your links may not be worth as much and/or you are headed towards a big surprise drop in rankings when Google’s algorithm catches up and penalizes you harshly as it has done to many other spammy SEO techniques that “used to work”.
#2. Sending Everybody “Home”
In an ideal world, everyone finds your website for every related search term at #1 in the search engines and goes directly to your home page and browses from there… kind of how you planned!
In the real world, it’s not a bad thing for people to find your inner pages that are more relevant to a particular topic and eventually make their way to your home page — and it’s a very bad thing if ALL of your back-links link back to your home page exclusively — not very flattering to all that content elsewhere on your website that you’ve worked hard on, is it?
Also, many links to “home” on your website isn’t helpful to the search engines… you don’t want to rank for the word “home” unless you’re a home building company & even then it’s probably not the term you’re targeting. Your home page should be targeting the terms that make sense for your business.
#1. Impatience
Just as in real life — success in SEO requires patience in achieving goals and constant effort with an eye on the target.
SEO is not a “once and done” process and algorithms and your competition change & evolve constantly… yet another reason why we advocate a steady, on-going approach to search engine optimization and internet marketing in general. Getting a site to be #1 on Google for any term is likely to take some time, and for the highly competitive ones, may take a long time or not even be possible! Getting those #1 rankings takes a fantastic website design, great on-going SEO work, and time.
This is why research and analysis is so critical. If you understand the link profile of your competition, it helps to understand a realistic time-frame for catching up with them in terms of “link power” and at what rate you will need to acquire quality back-links — and if you have great relevant content and on-site optimization, it’s only a matter of time & patience.
