When optimizing your website for search engines there are a few rumored tricks that just aren’t worth messing with. Below I’ve listed a few of the most common, and shocking, search engine optimization worst practices.

Hiding keyword-rich text – Sure, you could load keywords in white font on white background or make them too small to the user’s eye and the user wouldn’t be bothered, however, the search engines are smarter than that.

Keyword stuffing – I have shared with you the importance of keywords in your copy. Remember that you do want your keyword all over the place, but you don’t want it in so many places that you start looking suspicious.  For example, don’t use the same keyword in every meta tag and alt image tag.

Just because BP oil is highly searched doesn’t mean you should dedicate a page to it. Dedicating pages to certain keywords is a great idea, so long as you can do it tactfully and with something that is actually relevant to your content.

On that note, when you optimize your content for keywords, remember to make it user-friendly.  Not only does the user appreciate copy meant for them, but the search engines will catch on if your copy starts to sounds strange.

Repeatedly submitting your site to search engines will hurt you in the long run.  Don’t worry; if you submitted it once, they probably got it.

Just because your competitor’s name is searched often, doesn’t mean it will serve you well to add their name to your keywords. That’s just confusing.

Avoid creating duplicates of the same page with little differences between them.  Search engines will catch onto that, to,o and why not put all your efforts into making your one page get to the top rather than a bunch of pages doing OK?

Creating web pages just for search engines also won’t do you well.  On-page SEO is only part of the picture. You will receive very few links to a page that doesn’t serve the user.

Directories=good.  Link farms=bad.

I didn’t even know people use machine-generated pages, but apparently they make search-engine targeted pages to lead to your site. Bad idea!

“Pagejacking” and “cloaking” – To start, it’s illegal. Pagejacking is the act of stealing a highly optimized page from someone else’s site and placing it on yours. Usually it’s then “cloaked” to cover it from the user.

Lastly, purchasing expired domains because they used to have great SEO won’t benefit you either. Google recently changed its algorithm to take Page Rank down to 0 when a page expires (keep that in mind, too, if you’ve been working on your SEO – don’t let your page expire!).

If you’re looking for some more how-to’s rather than how not-to’s, take a look at my previous blog post on how to do SEO by yourself. Also, some of these “tricks” have been gathered from Search Engine Land’s 29 Worst Practices & Most Common Failures: SEO Checklist Part 1. I hope you’ll check it out for more information on the topic.