Search engines and SEO in general are changing on what seems like a daily basis. Algorithms are constantly being tweaked, and what worked like a charm 2 months ago, may be falling flat today. This presents an interesting mix of excitement and stress for most marketing companies, and I won’t lie… we are not exempt.

While I could talk all day long about what could help in the short or long term for a website’s online performance, it might be easier to list what NOT to do. We spend a lot of time researching, analyzing and scouring the web, and we’ve seen some questionable things, so here it goes…

What NOT to do with your website

• Make a site entirely comprised of Flash. Search engines don’t need to find your website.
• Rely on Javascript for all links. You should make it as hard as possible for a search engine to crawl your website.
• Ignore social media completely.  Facebook? LinkedIn? Pfft, they’re just fads.
• Stick with newspaper ads instead of a highly targeted PPC campaign. Proven results don’t mean anything.
• Keep content the same…… forever. Why do other companies waste time writing fresh content all the time?  So what if they are constantly ranking higher?
• Ignore analytics. You don’t need to know where visitors come from, or who is converting to a sales lead. That’s where those expensive newspaper ads come in handy…. right?
• If you DO end up optimizing your website, just do it once. 6 months later everything should hopefully be the same anyways.

Once the <sarcasm> HTML tag has been created, this entire list would surely be contained in it, so my apologies.  Also, sorry about the <sarcasm> joke.

Anyways, this is just scratching the service of BAD choices. It was a lot of fun to write surprisingly, so I will definitely be doing it again. In the meantime, have a look at some of our other related articles :

- SEO Rule #3 – It’s Never Too Late To Promote
- SEO Rule #2 – Focus On Website Goals
- SEO Rule #1 – Content Is King