Brain-dead content
Don’t turn your visitors into zombies. Produce engaging, quality content.
Franken URLs
Don’t use complex URLs that are butchered together with IDs and numbers. Unless you’re using an e-commerce site, keep ‘em clean and simple.
Black hat techniques
Don’t be a witch and practice the dark arts. There may be quick wins in using questionable activities, but SEO is a long-term strategy, and search engines catch on fast.
Phantom pages
Don’t serve ghostly alternate versions of your site to search engines and another version to your visitors.
Unruly robots
Don’t let your robots.txt frighten you. Make sure your rules are in good shape and not blocking half of your content.
Devilish duplicates
Don’t display the duplicate infernal content on different pages; search engines do not like sibling rivalries. Content with an evil twin can cause duplicate content issues, bloats your site and does not make for a good user experience.
Grim Ripper
Please don’t give your site an early grave by ripping content from other websites and displaying it as your own. Rewrite the content in a more engaging and unique way if necessary.
Satanic ritURLs
Don’t let unholy URLS that are not intended for display get the better of you. If they display the same content as on another page then use a 301 redirect and/or a canonical pointing to the originating page – or block them altogether and serve a 404 page. See VCM SEO.
Shocking semantics
Don’t waste electricity and bloat your pages with nonsensical inline code. Use clean semantic markup instead – search engines will love you for it.
Headless bodies
Don’t let sections of your content go wandering aimlessly. Give them meaning. Ensure you use heading tags, such as H1, H2, and H3 tags.
Wolf bytes/Core Vitals
Don’t let your visitors get a mega bite from large downloads. Page speed & file size is essential. Bite the silver bullet and keep file sizes on frequently accessed pages to a minimum.
Melancholic Meta
Don’t let gloomy descriptions get your visitors down. Make ‘em short, sweet, and compelling. If you use the Keywords meta tag and it is filled to the brim, give that a clean-up, too—or remove it altogether.
Curse of the dummy
Don’t get wrapped up in producing content for search engines. Create fresh, unique and engaging content for your visitors, and then optimise that content for search engines. Importantly, get social. Find your niche and build relationships online.