One of the best ways to optimize your site is by implementing good SEO practices. Although there many things that could go wrong while performing SEO, it is of utmost importance to take into cognizance the don’ts of SEO practices. Let’s take a look at some major SEO practices to avoid.

POOR SEO PLANNING

Your keyword research should unarguably be the first thing you should put into consideration when planning a website. Unfortunately, this is one of the mistakes most site owners make. The earlier you optimize your site, the more opportunities you have to rank well for your keywords. Starting off early could save you a lot of aggravation and stress later.

KEYWORD STUFFING

This is not only a lousy SEO practice but also a total waste of your precious time. This is probably one of the most common SEO mistakes most people make. Do not place a particular keyword over and over again in Meta descriptions or content just because you want to be significant for that search engine term. Gone are the days when keyword stuffing guarantees you a high ranking because most search engines are utilizing advanced methods to detect page quality.

AVOID CLOAKING

One of the best things to do to maintain a reasonable level of SEO practice is to stay away from cloaking. Not just for SEO purposes, but for moral purpose too. Cloaking is a method of creating two entirely different types of content, one for the visitor, one for the search engine. Not only does this annoy the visitor but it also makes the search engine unhappy too. A typical example is making the search engine feel your topic is in digital marketing but the visitor ends p reading something based on health products. Although few search engines are still susceptible to this, it is advisable to stay away from this.

DON’T USE PAID LINKS

A successful website or blog is not created in a day. You need consistency and hard work. Although it may be hard, resist from buying links of any kind. Try to develop valuable contents so you can have natural backlinks. If Google finds out, you stand a chance of losing your rankings.

DUPLICATE CONTENT

You should make sure content posted on your site is SEO friendly and original. Make use of excellent and experienced content writers to write original articles for you. Avoid duplicating contents from other sites as this is also not ethical. Whenever you come across some useful contents on a website and you wish to share with your readers ensure “no index and no follow” those pages to maintain your ranking.

SLOW WEBSITES

Your website should load in less than 4-5 seconds and should be available 24/7 all the time. Anything that does not comply with the above rules, it’s considered by me as bad SEO practice. A good hosting provider is vital for having 24/7 availability, and a modern software (like WordPress) can help you build fast websites that load within the accepted range.

POOR UTILIZATION OF GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS

There is still more rooms for improvement when you put to good use the numerous tools available for Google webmaster. Here, you can gather more information to enable you establish better communication with webmasters. Getting tons of information about your website can help you improve your SEO rankings in Google.