There is tons of contradictory information out there on the Web regarding what to do to achieve successful SEO results. All too often, these sites ignore the discussion of what makes for bad search engine optimization. The following list are the five things not to do when approaching SEO:

1. Using hidden text- it is bad practice to hide text or links either by making the font color match the background or via the use of hidden text.
2. Keyword Stuffing – do not overload your page or metadata content with keywords. As we’ve previously discussed, using keywords in moderation (3-5% of body content) and when they’re of help to the user is key.
3. Non-search engine friendly URLs- using references such as “page-1″ in your URLs does not help your SEO efforts. Make sure to avoid general paths such as this and instead, use descriptive, hyphen-separated paths to your pages.
4. Shallow internal linking – links on your site should be used frequently and where they are of help to the user. Linking only to your homepage, for example, from your internal pages is an SEO no-no. You want to spread the SEO “juice” across your site by linking from pages with high levels of authority to relevant pages deep in your site hierarchy, and vise versa.
5. Non-hierarchical site structure – for company websites especially, it is imperative that your site is structured in a hierarchical manner in which certain pages are automatically deemed more important by their rank/placement amongst your website content. That is to say, if you have 3 products– product a, product b, and product c, these should all be housed beneath a “products” page/section, which should be housed beneath your homepage or another parent category that makes sense. Avoid placing less important content in a top level position on your website.

These are just five things (of many) to keep in mind when implementing an SEO strategy. In a future post, we will dig deeper into SEO no-nos and the damage that can be incurred if not adhering to SEO best practices.