Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.
I have listed the things you should not do while doing SEO work. Sometimes knowing what not to do is the easier way to find the right thing. If you do not have an idea or have difficulty in understanding some of the issues listed here, your seo company or seo expert can give you more detailed information.
- Using text in the <title> element that has no relation to the content on the page.
- Using default or vague text like “Untitled” or “New Page 1”.
- Using a single title in all <title> elements across your site’s pages or a large group of pages.
- Using extremely lengthy text in <title> elements that are unhelpful to users.
- Stuffing unneeded keywords in your <title> element.
- Writing a meta description tag that has no relation to the content on the page.
- Using generic descriptions like “This is a web page” or “Page about baseball cards”.
- Filling the description with only keywords.
- Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the meta description tag.
- Using a single meta description tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages.
- Placing text in heading tags that wouldn’t be helpful in defining the structure of the page.
- Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate.
- Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another.
- Excessive use of heading tags on a page.
- Very long headings.
- Using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure.
- Using invalid markup.
- Changing the source code of your site when you are unsure about implementing markup.
- Adding markup data which is not visible to users.
- Creating fake reviews or adding irrelevant markups.
- Creating complex webs of navigation links, for example, linking every page on your site to every other page.
- Going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (so that it takes twenty clicks to reach from the homepage).
- Having a navigation based entirely on images, or animations.
- Letting your navigational page become out of date with broken links.
- Creating a navigational page that simply lists pages without organizing them, for example by subject.
- Allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your web server is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code or—in the case of JavaScript-based sites—include the noindex tag when non-existent pages are requested).
- Blocking 404 pages from being crawled through the robots.txt file.
- Providing only a vague message like “Not found”, “404”, or no 404 page at all.
- Using a design for your 404 pages that isn’t consistent with the rest of your site.
- Using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs.
- Choosing generic page names like page1.html.
- Using excessive keywords like baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.html.
- Having deep nesting of subdirectories like …/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html.
- Using directory names that have no relation to the content in them.
- Having pages from subdomains and the root directory access the same content, for example, domain.com/page.html and sub.domain.com/page.html.
- Writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes.
- Awkward or poorly written content.
- Embedding text in images and videos for textual content: users may want to copy and paste the text and search engines can’t read it.
- Dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation.
- Rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users.
- Having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site.
- Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users.
- Having blocks of text like “frequent misspellings used to reach this page” that add little value for users.
- Deceptively hiding text from users, but displaying it to search engines.
- Providing insufficient content for the purpose of the page.
- Putting distracting advertisements on your pages.
- Writing generic anchor text like “page”, “article”, or “click here”.
- Using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of the page linked to.
- Using the page’s URL as the anchor text in most cases, although there are certainly legitimate uses of this, such as promoting or referencing a new website’s address.
- Writing long anchor text, such as a lengthy sentence or short paragraph of text.
- Using CSS or text styling that make links look just like regular text.
- Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines.
- Creating unnecessary links that don’t help with the user’s navigation of the site.
- Using CSS to display images that you want us to index.
- Using generic filenames like image1.jpg, pic.gif, 1.jpg when possible—if your site has thousands of images you might want to consider automating the naming of the images.
- Writing extremely lengthy filenames.
- Stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting entire sentences.
- Writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spammy.
- Using only image links for your site’s navigation.
- Attempting to promote each new, small piece of content you create; go for big, interesting items.
- Involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services.
- Spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area.
- Purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank.