SEO No-No's

The don't of SEO are as many and glamorous and the lists of do's.

1. Text-free pages - just an image sitting on a page is not good.

2. Excessive optimisation - widget, widget, widget, widget, widget - needless keyword stuffing in your content is not smart, and search engines are.

3. Content and image theft. Keep your material unique.

4. Jack of all trades - master of none. If your pages all have great long lists of keywords and great long rambling content that tries to cover too many subjects, you will end up confusing the search engines as much as your readers. Rather split it all up into logical and relevant sections, taking care to optimise for each.

5. Excessive or silly use of Flash, frames or Javascript. Google does now claim to be able to crawl Flash, and good for them, but coding entire sites in it is still not wildly recommended. It makes it hard, fiddly, time consuming and costly to create and update content. Most importantly, flash tends to be overly presentational - as I've said elsewhere on this site, folks will 99% of the time be coming to your site for your content not for the way it looks or the way your hard-to-follow navigation system bucks and swirls as you mouse over it.

6. Invisible Text - an oldie but a goodie - still comes in under keyword stuffing heading really but this is different in that the stuffing is supposedly rendered invisible to the naked eye by rendering the words in the same colour as the background against which they appear. Again, the Search Engines are wise to this and won't think you're big or cleaver.

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