Five SEO Tactics That Don't Work

1. I'll just stuff my business website full of keywords to get top rankings.

   Did you know that on-page optimisation is only a small part of SEO? The majority of ranking factors depend on off-page optimisation, mainly links. It doesn't matter how many keywords you manage to work into your site - without a strong link profile, your website won't see that great an improvement. In fact, placing too many keywords onto your website without any consideration for user experience can even get your website a search engine penalty.

2. I'll comment on thousands of blogs to get links back to my business. Those spammers do it, so it must work.

   Actually, the majority of blog comments won't do you much good directly from an SEO perspective because most blog utilize the "nofollow" attribute on their comments. This means that search engines will simply ignore your comment link. Having said that, thoughtful comments on relevant blogs can certainly get you more exposure from interested visitors clicking through to your site - just don't expect them to do much for your rankings.

3. I'll start a link exchange to get lots of links back to my business site.

   Search engines aren't stupid. Reciprocal links don't hold nearly as much value as one-way links because people use them for reasons just like this one. You'll be lucky if you see any ranking improvement at all by starting a link exchange.

4. I'll pay people to link to me!

   This tactic actually can work. However, it's so risky and search engines are able to detect paid links so well that if you don't know what you're doing, you're likely to do more harm than good for your site. If you get caught buying (or selling) links for SEO purposes your website can get penalized and actually suffer a drop in rankings. If you're willing to spend money to get exposure, try a Google AdWords PPC campaign instead.

5. I'll buy a whole bunch of those online marketing and SEO eBooks to help me promote my business - they're experts and must know what they're talking about.

   Don't waste your money. 99% of eBooks about search engine optimisation and online marketing in general don't tell you anything you can't find for free via a Google search. And a lot of the time, those eBooks are just a pathway for the author to promote some other (usually more expensive) product that they're selling.

So...what do I do?

You have two viable options. You can learn all about SEO on your own through research, testing, or maybe finding someone else to help teach you. This process is time consuming and even after you know what you're doing, the process of doing it is equally as time consuming. Many business owners simply don't have the time or resources to keep up with their search engine optimisation by themselves. There are so many other tasks to do and SEO can easily be a day-in-day-out ongoing task. Not only is it time consuming, but it never ends!

The second option is to find a trusted online marketing or SEO company with a proven track record and employ them to do your SEO. Online marketing companies are a dime a dozen, but with some thorough searching you can find a service that's worth the money. In the end, this option lets you keep working on other aspects of your business without spending half of your time trying to get your site found in Google.