10 SEO Suidical Attempts - The Hangman's Noose!

Despite the fact that there are many SEO firms and experts out there who claim to be following the ethical practices and seem to know what they are doing, there seem to be hitches and glitches everywhere. While SEO can lead your website to the best of places, some basic mistakes in it can also become the hangman's noose for you, leaving you and your website stranded.

So today we take a look at the most common SEO mistakes or as I'd rather call them...
The Top Ten SEO Suicidal Attempts:

1. Hiring the Vigilant: When choosing to hire a SEO company for your business, make sure that you pick out only the best. Since SEO has the capacity to make or break your business, it is best to choose an experienced company after much research and questioning. Remember to question as much as you can and even meet a couple of their clients if you can for maximum satisfaction. You will be paying them so its your job to understand and know about them as much as possible, because if you don't then you might end up paying a high price for their mistakes.

2. Website Usability: Do not avoid things like logical navigation, simple structure, good linking and quality content. These are considered by both, the visitors and the search engines, so rest assured that it will not be overlooked. Even the smallest downloading issue or complication with these can make a visitor lose interest.

3. Generalized Keywords and Phrases: Opting for keywords that are too general will lead you nowhere. Chances are that these keywords will also be competitive and the higher the count there is for these keywords, the lesser the chances are of your website getting ranked anywhere on the top for these. Specific keywords/phrases tend to work well and these are possibly something that potential customers will possibly use when trying to find the services/products you offer.

4. Duplicate Content: Having the same content, not just on your web pages as text but also in the meta title, is a no-go. Before you know it, your site will start appearing in the supplemental index and will be caught for duplicate content issues.

5. Same Anchor Text: Try using different anchor texts when linking your website. Using the same text every time for linking is considered unnatural and doesn't really help your link building in anyway.

6. Stuffed Up Web Pages: Stuffing your meta tags, page footer or the page header with keywords is called spam. Same as with hiding text in the background or anywhere else on the page. You will get caught, so don't do it!

7. Domain Name Issues: Always be careful with your domain name. Search engines consider www.mydomain.com and domain.com as 2 different websites, so you can imagine what that could possibly mean. You will get caught for duplicate content for sure.

8. Too Much Link Usage: Using your website link over and over in your guest books, blogs or comments is not good SEO. This will be taken as spamming.

9. Restrained Spiders: Incorrect robots.txt files, having an all-flash and full of graphics website that the spiders can't crawl, various session IDs and a number of variables in your website URL are capable of restraining search engine spiders to crawl your web pages and hence prevent it from getting properly indexed.

10. Disturbed Link Trade: Trading links with every website is not the very best of ideas. Although reciprocal linking is good but it is best to trade links with quality sites only and with those related to your industry.

The list can continue well beyond where it stopped. Your additions and comments are welcome :)