SEO Services, technology and web design

Posted by randfish

I’ve been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW – sorry for the delays, the volume’s tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we’re a bit overwhelmed). It’s been a great learning experience and I’ve gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject. As a partial remedy, I thought I’d take some time tonight to cover a few of the worst offenders:

Repetitive Keyword Targeting
If you’re targeting a specific keyword term or phrase, it’s not necessary, and often ill-advised, to place that keyword in the title tag, H1 and body text of every page on your site. It’s certainly OK to use the term/phrase in passing and when relevant, but remember that pages target rankings, not sites – a good rule is to target one specific keyword term/phrase per page, sometimes more, but only in rare circumstances (like when you’re trying to get a secondary, indented listing) do you actually want to targe the same term on multiple pages.
Splitting Efforts Across Many Domains
If you’ve found 10 reliable sources to get links, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can register 500 domains, get them all links from your 10 sources, then link from those sites back to your main domain and suddenly appear to have a diverse domain backlink profile. Splitting up your efforts on multiple domains is, in my opinion, rarely advisable (see this post for more) and can seriously detract from your goal of gaining rankings on a single site. The days of link farms and link islands are long gone – with link acquisition, quality is slowly but surely getting the upper hand on quantity, so use strategies that will get you the right links, not just any link.
Reciprocal Linking
I’m not sure what happened, but reciprocal linking seems to be making a comeback (and both Google & Yahoo! have been doling out some penalties recently for sites engaging in it). It’s not that reciprocal linking is inherently bad – if I link to Aaron’s SEOBook (a great site, BTW), and he links to me (which he sometimes does), that’s not what I’d call “reciprocal linking.” I’m referring to the practice of creating link list pages on websites and then trading with other link list pages on other sites – the “you link to me and I’ll link to you” phenomenon. These aren’t hard to algorithmically spot and we see penalty after penalty (or at least, devaluation) hitting sites that leverage this tactic.

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