SEO Strategies that do not Work

There are several ways on how to rank well in the search engine results page but there are so called SEO myths that many website owners and even bloggers adopt to rank well in the SERP or at least to get higher page rank. Worse, some people still endorse these strategies unaware that such SEO methods do not work. What are these SEO myths and fallacies? Here are some of the popular SEO strategies that do not work:

1. Link Exchange. Link exchange particularly excessive exchanging of links can have negative results in a site's ranking. This was mentioned under "Link schemes" in Google's webmaster help center. I am not saying it is bad to exchange link. Blogrolls are essential in the blogging community but website owners should practice exchanging links for other purposes other than for SEO. Blogrolls, for example, can be used to drive direct traffic to your friends' sites or to your other blogs.

2. Use of meta keywords. I have been using the keyword field of the All in One SEO Pack for as long as I can remember only to realize that my efforts were useless. Thanks to the SEO Fast Start ebook by Dan Thies who discussed about the irrelevance of meta keywords. Meta description is important as this can improve click through rates in the SERP but meta keywords are now being ignored by the search engine. A better alternative to using the meta keyword is to strategically incorporate your important keyword in the meta description and by strategically, I mean putting your important keyword in the first few words of your post description.

3. Keyword stuffing. Keyword density does NOT matter. You do not have to repeat a keyword over and over again for your page to rank well in that particular keyword. Humans hate spams and search engines hate sites that spam keywords. The "ideal keyword density", or what can be considered as just the right number of a keyword's occurrence so a page cannot be considered as spammy by the search engines vary among webmasters. There are in fact tools that measure keyword density but there is one trick to make sure your article is not overstuffed with keywords: Read your article and if it already sounds silly because you always use your keyword instead of using some pronouns, you are already abusing your keywords.

PS. i am still working out on NOT to overstuff my articles with keywords.