Image courtesy: Erling Steen

If you have read my previous posts on SEO, you might remember that I mentioned somewhere that we can’t optimize a webpage 100%. Even if we can do that, it won’t be a successful effort as the search engines don’t like fully optimized web pages. They always try to find the webpage which satisfies maximum of the searcher’s requirements, NOT the best optimized page. In this post I will explain you about the mistakes that you must avoid when doing SEO.

If your website page title and <H1> header has the same word phrase exactly, all the links to that page in other web pages of your website and links to that page from other websites contains the same word phrase used in the Page title description, the search engine bots will identify that you have done SEO more than required. They will degrade your search results and the frequency of crawling will be reduced. You have to make sure that you don’t do this mistake.

There is another concept called “Avoiding poison words”. Poison words are a set of words that search engines don’t like to see in a web page which have been used for SEO purposes. For examples, words like “link exchange”, “add URL”, “Forum”, “Guest book” or “link partners” which are commonly used in link building. If you want to use these words, make sure that you use other words for this. I hope that you can find many other words or phrases as the English language has many . Then you can avoid the bad reaction of search engines for poison words.

Google is more interested on improving their search system to facilitate informative search while Yahoo is more interested in business search. You have to consider this also when doing SEO according to the niche of your website.

You must always try to make a natural appearing website with SEO techniques used, rather than a highly optimized one. If your website can provide valuable information that people like, they will definitely link you back. By doing this you can build a good brand for your website and which will ultimately improve your ROI (Return on Investment). What I believe most is that, as long as your website appears natural, informative, original and useful, you will find new visitors and loyal customers. If you do SEO more than needed and copy others work, you will lose everything after some time.

I hope that you gained something from this post. In the next post, I will explain you about the www and search engines.