How *NOT* to Improve SEO with a Blog: The Bigger, Badder List

How *NOT* to Improve SEO with a Blog: Five Golden Rules

1. Do not stray from your blog's theme. Keep your content focused on the strategy and topic. Don’t stray off-topic just to increase keywords or external links.



2. Do not keyword-stuff your content. Never, ever create Blogs or Blog posts that contain more keywords than valuable content. When your keywords outnumber your verbs, or your content begins to feel stilted or nonsensical, you’re probably beginning to stray from best practices.



3. Do not link your Blog off of irrelevant Blogs, sites or link farms. There are plenty of “spam Blogs” out there, Blogs that have been created solely for SEO or Google AdSense revenue. Steer clear – don’t link to these sites just because they may have a higher page rank or use similar keywords. Similarly, don’t link to highly-trafficked Blogs or sites if they don’t specifically relate to your topic.



4. Do not create multiple Blogs for the sake of link building. This is becoming a more common practice, and it’s not a good one. Blogs should be informative, contain good, useful content, and serve as a compliment to your site. While they may assist your company in achieving higher rankings, restrain yourself from creating half a dozen keyword-crammed Blogs to increase your search traffic. Unless you legitimately have enough unique content to create several quality Blogs, restrict yourself to as many (or as few) Blogs as you can maintain well. Really, one is sufficient. Creating multiple, keyword-stuffed Blogs may increase rankings in the short-term, but it’s potentially damaging to your brand, and it may eventually get you blacklisted from one or more major search engines.



5. Do not Comment Spam. Comment and trackback spam are the latest tricks in the blackhat book. By posting an irrelevant comment on a Blog that contains a link to their own Blog, the comment spammer increases his or her own incoming links. This practice includes “compliment spam” (i.e. “Great post!” or a similar, noncommittal compliment followed by a link to your unrelated Blog.) Trackback spam is a reverse action, where the spammer includes links to popular - but again, irrelevant – posts on other Blogs within his or her own Blog to increase their link universe and rankings.
   
   When you own your own Blog, you’ll see how great problem comment and trackback spam can be. SixApart recently introduced their TypeKey product which forces commenters to register and/or authenticate before posting. Other applications exist to limit the problem. But unless the spammers get really out of hand, try to avoid turning off the comment and trackback features on your blog. Used properly, they are great link-building tools.

I know I posted this list a while back, but I thought the elaboration would make it more useful to a) novices and b) anyone who didn't attend the webinar in July. Plus, it's kinda fun this way, isn't it?