Last week we covered the first few things on what not to do in SEO. Now let\’s continue the discussion with some more Don\’ts when it comes to SEO:

• Don\’t use \”Doorways\” – Doorways are pages that do not have meaningful or useful content, usually created automatically to just manipulate search engine spiders, gain lots of content, place ads and earn money, or redirect traffic to real sites. These techniques are easily spotted by search engines so focus on creating a page that will be useful to visitors and you will be rewarded in time with a better search ranking.
• Don\’t use mirror pages – These are pages with the same or very similar content. If your content is identical, it doesn\’t matter how many sites you put it on as the search engines will only count it once. In fact, too many mirror pages might even harm the first/main page that they crawl so avoid mirror pages and make sure no one else has done so on other sites.
• Don\’t try to manipulate search engines by little tricks like keyword-stuffing (repeating too much of the same keyword throughout the entire page), small-sized texts that cannot be seen by people but are crawled by bots; invisible copy (same or very similar color for both texts and their backgrounds), etc. All you end up with is a ban or a penalty from Google or Yahoo. Basically, whatever you might think of, the search engine companies already have thought of it. Focus on creating pages that people actually will want to visit.
• Don\’t submit your site to FFA (Free For All) link farms. This will not add any link value and possibly harm your website rankings. This includes auto-submissions too. Don\’t re-submit too often trying to push some big directories the inclusion of your site. You\’ll end up with the ban from them. Don\’t submit to sites where it\’s too easy to submit and if there are too many items (sites) there. Instead submit to quality directories and gain links from relevant sites and blogs.
• Don\’t submit to search engines. Each search engine has a website submission form and they encourage you to submit through this form. Don\’t! First, check if your site is already indexed or you might get banned or penalized if it is already part of their search index. If your site isn\’t there yet, simply place a link on a homepage or other strong page on some quality website, and your new site will be included into the index much faster than via the forms anyway.
• Don\’t compete for irrelevant keywords. Some sites discover the popular keywords and try to write articles geared towards those words. For marketing purposes, this is useless because you don\’t need traffic, you need a converting traffic. You need people who are actually interested in what you\’ve got to offer on your website. So, only compete for the keywords relevant to your field.
• Don\’t sell links. Period! If you do this it can lead to your site being penalized and/or dropped to a zero pagerank as well as possible exclusion altogether from Google. This is obviously something you do not want to have happen so avoid selling links at all costs.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but hopefully has given you more insight into how SEO works. In general though, just be honest with yourself and always ask a simple question: Will my visitors like what I do with my website and benefit from it? If the answer is \”Yes\” then you have already followed the best guideline possible. Until next time\”¦

Shavkat Karimov
Director, Online Marketing
mobileStorm, Inc.
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