SEO can get tricky and certain things that seem like they will help your rankings will actually hurt them. If you want to get free targeted traffic to your site then you must understand SEO. The internet is a world in itself and millions of people enter it to find information that they are desperate the get their hands on. Search engine traffic can literally bring millions of visitors to your site so it doesn’t make much business sense to ignore it.

Getting good search engine ranking is equal to money in the bank. With SEO there are certain practices that you never want to apply to your site and we are going to tell you a few. For some reason, many internet marketers believe that SEO is a bag of tricks that is updated every month, in fact, it is the opposite.

Neglecting O-page SEO

The most common blunder is neglecting on-site SEO. For something that people have complete control over; it’s shocking that so many neglect it. On-page SEO is basically how everything on your site is organized. On-site navigation is actually the easy part of SEO, you want to pay attention to your navigation, ALT tags, header tags, and file names. Each on-page element should contain your main keywords. The search engines are big on creating the best experience for their users and on-site optimization helps with it tremendously. These are very basic on-page SEO methods that will be implemented by your competing sites, so it’s always good to stay ahead.

Faulty Internal Linking

Faulty internal linking is a huge mistake that even many marketers don’t know they are making. Your site’s internal linking is all in your hands and it is an additional factor that you have 100% control over. This strategy is often overlooked by many as people focus more on the outbound links. But when you put everything in place, you’ll see great results. And what makes it so great is that these are permanent results, not temporary. A perfect example of a good internal linking structure is Wikipedia; notice how they have all of these links that send you to a page with a similar topic?

Black Hat Techniques

Consultants who practice SEO and aren’t ethical need to be avoided. Nowadays, you find a number of companies who aim at providing SEO services. Most of these companies are ok to work with, but some of the companies use black hat techniques, or techniques that don’t work within ethical boundaries. The search engines could ban your site and you wouldn’t even realize it until later. So if you plan to work with SEO consultants, only hire the ones whose reputations precede them and who will give you progress updates on a regular basis. The more they reveal to you the better they’ll be.

Just stay away from too much flashiness on your page and use ALT tags on your images whenever you can. If you can avoid committing the above blunders, you will avoid a ban and will get indexed higher than ever with the search engines.