What you should NOT do?

I'm just starting up my site, have been studying up and reading quite a bit about things that you should do to improve traffic and SEO.

I would like to know, is there anything that you should specifically avoid doing as a start up that may impact you negatively further down the line?

Thanks

 

It is so simple, but you would be surprised how many people still try and do them....

Resist paying for traffic, unless you want traffic from China that is completely useless.

I find blog commenting a fantastic way of building links and creating traffic, but it is important NOT to spam blogs and always leave a good comment.

I would also say steer clear of any scripts that claim to help you with your SEO, they will almost always been blackhat and will get you into trouble with mighty Google.

 

Yeah I figured to stay well clear of the scripts.

What about duplicate content? As in the same content at multiple addresses. Are crawlers advanced enough to know for example that one particular site is a duplicate of another or if a particular article on a site is a duplicate from another site? Could it effect you negatively.

Also links from sites with unrelated content? Say for instance a site about chickens back linking to a technology site?

 

@deansaliba What is your opinion on paying for Adwords and other ad providers? I think those sites, with a good ad campaing, can be of real help to drive targeted traffic. But I don't have any real world experience with it, only what I have read online.

As for getting paid traffic from PTC sites (neobux and such) is always a bad idea.

 

In my opinion, you should worry less about SEO and more about building your brand and content. If you have something that people actually want to see and visit, you will get traffic, and more legitimate traffic will mean a higher search results. You can always optimize later, but an optimized site without much content is worthless (in terms of building a useful and interesting internet).

 

Agreed, I've spent the last three weeks looking into it heavily and my final conclusion was the same. There is all this different analysis type software and what not but I think one can get overly caught up in that.

Although I wouldn't discount having at least a basic knowledge of SEO and what it is your trying to achieve with your site.

For instance the tools I'm looking to use primarily now are Google Web Admin Tools and Google Analytics. One thing I noticed this morning was that in web admin tools the google crawler has indexed my forum with the most commonly used keywords based on totally irrelevant stuff. Like the fact that Xenforo appears on each page. Or particular user names that have been posting frequently.

I have the name Tommy in my top ten most used keywords throughout my site. So I'm guessing I'm misunderstanding something or Xenforo by default is not set up that well for keyword optimization. I mean user profile information is totally irrelevant for my search target criteria.

Any case, I'm looking into it further this week to see what I can find but if anyone has come across this or has any thoughts would be interested to hear them.

 

I agree, knowing SEO is great, and an understanding of it is vital if you want a high search rank, but it is not the have all and end all of the internet. I've seen thousands of sites, clogging up my search results over the years that are crap, have horrible content or no content, and are SEO'd to the teeth. I've also seen countless people advertising on sites like Elance and Odesk for people to SEO the hell out of their crappy, no-content sites. It lowers the overall quality of the internet.

Now, having a site with great content and a high level of SEO....that is the ideal from the producing standpoint. I still wish the crawlers could evaluate better based on content.

 

Another point to take into account when it comes to buy traffic is the potential banning that you may experience if Chinese traffic is instructed to click on your ads insanely.

I did buy traffic once and do not only had bandwidth issues related to the Chinese traffic received but also a ban from a good sponsoring program that detected not just the country originating such traffic, but also that they were using a sort of automation stuff for clicking.

 

Use any sort of spamming tool like xrumer. That's about as 'black hat' as you can possibly get, and a very good way to get both hated by the internet and kicked out of search engines.

The most obvious thing not to do though is very simple; meaningless content. If your site is actually somewhat useful to human visitors, then it stands a much better of chance of getting decent search engine rankings. On the other hand, if it's some low quality, crappy spam/ad fest, then don't be surprised when you don't rank for anything and no one visits your completely worthless website.

 

Just recently I was brought on to 'consult' for a new startup. The person was throwing some major time and money into the project however I was to be utilized on a q&a basis.
Long story short, most of what is discussed above is what he tried doing. Buying traffic, spam links, spam directories etc.
The highlight was when he spammed other forums and blogs and his home IP got added to a spam DB. Now could not post on his own forum as his spam tools were picking up his IP. LOL
Point is, he didn't listen and ended up creating a whole lot more work for himself.

I think the important thing is a good forum setup with detailed sections and descriptions, good server (not Hostgator, over sold IPs) and then content.

 

When you are starting off with creating any kind of site. You should focus on branding yourself and remember content is kind. We are moving into age where you just can't blast your site and be on the first page. In fact, doing that now will have you black listed for life. You should focus on building your site and the content that is with it.

 

Curiously there are many people talking about Xrumer as if this were software to get legit traffic, hence the reason why some webmasters never release they are making use of black hat techniques until they are banned or receive a slap from Google.

 

Well, would you publicly say you are doing something wrong? Especially when your goal is a high search rank? Of course not. The internet is not nearly as an anonymous place as people think.

 

Domain age can also play a factor in rankings especially if the sites have a lot of good backlinks.