Five ways to damage your SEO with content

1. Write Rubbish

If your content makes no sense, if it’s dull and irrelevant, if not even your mother would make it all the way through, then you can be sure it will be bad for SEO. Make content interesting, make content readable, make content fun!

2. Duplicate It

There’s nothing quite so annoying as content repeated again and again. I mean, there is NOTHING so annoying as content which is repeated time after time. Really, repeating content again and again and again is really, REALLY, really annoying. The search engines don’t like it either, you might even describe it as SEO’s worst nightmare. Don’t use content which is duplicated (or even just summarized) elsewhere on the internet — even if it’s your own copyright, especially if it’s duplicated on the same site. Check for originality on copyscape.com if you’re not certain, and even if you are. Even if the content is your copyright and has been copied by someone else, it can hit your SEO if the copying site has a higher Page Rank than yours.

3. Make It Invisible

For search engines, invisible text equals SEO scam. Technically, making content invisible to the naked eye — for example, making it the same colour as the background or making it transparent or putting it in comment tags — comes under the heading of “Black Hat SEO”, or cheating. It’s a way of artificially loading content with keywords [SEO, content, search engine, timeshare, cialys, pre5cription5] to bump up the density, and the search engines got wise to it years ago. It will hurt your SEO.

4. Use JavaScript To Present It

Search engines just won’t index content which is provided by JavaScript. There have been too many SEO scams using scripts in the past and Google and the rest aren’t taking chances any more. If all you can see in the content source code is a ton of JavaScript, then you can be sure that the search engines won’t be seeing it either.

5. Make It Chaotic

Content should make sense. Part of that is how it is organised. One of the best ways to ruin your SEO is to order content in an illogical, inconsistent fashion so that the reader doesn’t know whether they are at the beginning, middle or end. This extends to your <h> tags: use them in the order <h1>, <h2>, <h3> … <h6>. Keeping content organised means the search engine spiders can crawl it, index it and rank it to the best effect.

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