There are many different ways to achieve success with SEO it just really depends on what type of business you have, your competition and how your audience moves around online. Search engine optimization is a very interesting approach because no 2 approaches are often the same but still have close similarities. It really takes a variety of online marketing efforts working together at the same time to achieve the winning outcome.

There are however some very flawed SEO approaches that I have noticed over the years that truly deserve some attention. Approaches that I strongly feel will not last over time or have already utterly dwindled away. Will some individuals claim these efforts still work to make a paycheck? Of course but don’t be fooled. SEO is about marketing & branding not science.

Let’s go over a few:

Mass Distribution

What I mean by mass distribution is using software programs that attempt to generate thousands of links through some sort of software that has the word “blaster” in it. These approaches are horrible and often times lead to your website receiving some horrendous one way links point from websites that are from completely irrelevant websites. SEO & SEM is all about relevancy and it is important to keep that in mind when doing anything online.

Targeting Few Keywords

I often hear clients say that they worked with someone in the past that only targeted one or two keywords for their whole website. It is probably safe to say that these keywords where very broad keywords causing that particular website to really miss out on a great deal of targeted traffic through long tails. In my opinion a website should always be targeting a handful of different keywords per page in order to maximize the amount of keywords and phrases a website has the ability to achieve visibility for. Why limit yourself or your website to just a few?

Quantity vs. Quality

The days of requesting X amount of links is slowly coming to an end. Building links is not about quantity. It hasn’t been for a very long time. Sure more quality links is a great thing but a lot of crappy links is not going to help you one bit.

The search engine industry is slowly evolving into a much more quality driven marketing machine rather than a quantity one. Search engine users are quickly becoming conditioned to ignore a variety of information types. People are starting to quickly realize what it is that they want when they search so whacking them with lots of useless clutter won’t help anyone. SEO is about specific targeting and being efficient at all times and not just throwing out a blanket and hoping it lands on someone in your audience. Don’t get sucked into bad SEO attempts.