If you're monitoring your own SEO efforts - here's what NOT to do

If you manage or like to keep an eye on your own SEO efforts, I'm sure you've read up on the many, many things you SHOULD do when optimizing your web pages and web site to rank higher on search engines. But have you given much thought to what you SHOULDN'T do?

I read a great blog post on Online Marketing for Marketers called "When a Good Idea Goes Bad - SEO oopsies," which was a great summary of the things you should be wary of if you are new to search engine optimization or are just beginning to learn.

Some of the tips are pretty common sense, but you might be surprised at a few.

Here are a few tips that I liked the most and have helped us in our SEO efforts:

• The page title either lacks a kicker keyword phrase, is the same as every other page title on the site, or both.
•  The site uses javascript, flash or images for navigation making it difficult or impossible for spiders to follow the links.
•  The site is one big flash site.
• Make sure there is enough text on each page to keep a spider fully informed about the page. In doing so, make sure to actually use the words and phrases that a user might search for when researching the topic you’ve written about. 
  

Something that a "noob" (or newbie) may think work:

“Oh look”, thinks the noob, “putting that keyword phrase in the first paragraph of text bumped my rankings up a little bit. Hey, I know! I’ll put that phrase in the text another 50 times! Yeah! That’ll work great!

Key lesson: SEO is not a recipe that can be duplicated - you can't do the same thing a hundred times and expect good results!

If you would like t o read the full blog post, you can go to the Online Marketing for Markers blog and see what else Donna has to say about "SEO oopsies."

Do you have any to add to this list?