Are you optimizing your website for search engines? There is not one but dozens of techniques that internet marketers deploy to achieve higher page rankings. But, as Google rolls out one algorithm update after another, it is becoming increasingly important to weed out the harmful optimization methods. Listed below are a handful of bad SEO techniques that small business owners need to get rid of this year.

1. Poor Quality Content that Lacks Purpose

If a blog post or web page on your website is there just so you can optimize it for certain keywords and provides no real value to potential visitors, you might as well drop it. Each new page you add to the website should have a well defined purpose.

2. Unnatural Keyword Optimization

Google Panda updates would take no time penalizing websites that resort to unnatural keyword optimization or keyword stuffing. You’ve got to resist the temptation to use too many target keywords in each one of your web pages.

3. Purchasing Backlinks

Instead of investing on good quality content that naturally gets backlinks from other websites, you may want to just spend few hundred dollars on purchasing backlinks by way of sponsored guest posts, blog comment spamming and other such techniques. Don’t do that!

Guest posting is useful and so is blog commenting. But keep in mind that both of these techniques will help if your focus is on ‘adding value’ and not on spamming. Contribute good quality posts to high authority websites and write comments only after reading through articles.

4. Less Content per Page

You may want to create multiple pages dedicated to each one of the keywords you think is related to your business. Don’t do that!

The focus should be on adding ‘more’ (and better) content per page.

5. Focus on Search Engines and Forget About the Visitors

The focus should be on visitors first and search engines second. This perspective alone can put your SEO campaign in the right direction.

6. Not Tracking the Quality of Inbound and Outbound Links

Make it a point to cross check the source of backlinks as well as the websites your blog posts link to at least once every month.

Final Words

In a world ruled by Google, keep it all perfectly legal! Focus on creating value and serving the end user while optimizing a website on-page or off-page.