Whenever you open up a blog or look at a newsletter on SEO techniques, you are bombarded with the techniques that you need to adopt or should do to improve your ranking on search engines. Everyone has their opinion of 'The top 10 SEO tricks to try out' or '5 most important things to do to optimise your site'. They can't all be right and some of them have to be little more than time wasters.
So rather than ask for opinions about what should be done to improve your SEO, I want to rather ask the question:
'What are the SEO techniques that have little or no value to your ranking?'
To start the ball rolling, I believe that the following techniques are of little or no value to SEO and can be added to the SEO time wasters family.
- Submitting articles to second rate article directories.
- Agreeing to swap links on a 2 for 1 through link-swap companies that contact you via automated emails.
- Developing content that is readable but is really only intended for search engine ranking (i.e. careful keyword stuffing).
- Obsessing about Page Rank, Digg Rank and Alexa Rank (or others).
- Submitting to arbitrary directory sites.
- Focussing on quantity rather than quality when it comes to page content.
- Reading and following 'SEO-Rants' on blogs.
I am sure that we will get into some of the detail in this list as we go and I look forward to your opinions.
