SEO Pitfalls to Avoid When Promoting Your Home Business Online

One of the necessities of having a home business (or any business, for that matter) is promoting it online. There are a number of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods you can employ to get noticed by Google, but not all of them will result in long-term success. In fact, one of the biggest pitfalls of online promotion is using techniques that may garner really good short-term results, but leave you buried in the long run. Here are 4 SEO pitfalls to avoid as you try to gain more visibility for your home business online:

1. Hidden text and links. Many people use popular keywords and irrelevant links to help build popularity. But they don’t want their Web site copy to make no sense. In order to make sure that their visitors don’t see the senseless text, some color the text the same color as the background. This hides the text from customers, but not from search engines. Eventually, however, search engines do “catch on”. If you have black-on-black or white-on-white text, the search engines will learn to distinguish this — then possibly ban you.
2. Link farming. Many Web sites like to have a page of links. Blogrolls frequently feature related sites. This is not a bad thing — provided you update pages and the links are actually relevant to your site material (and you have other content besides links). However, in some cases SEO seekers will make a page full of links to unrelated Web sites. This allows popularity to built, since you are linking to high traffic sites. However, your ranking will eventually fall if you continue this practice. The search engines (especially Google) will recognize what you are doing and drop you off search results.
3. Keyword stuffing. This is when you choose keywords and then use them liberally in your Web copy. While having a few keywords, appearing naturally in the content, is desirable and can help customers find you, stuffing your content so full of keywords that it is hard to avoid them (and it begins to seem unnatural), is a no-no. You will find that search engines notice this over-frequency and may ban you.
4. Duplicating content. Premium is given to original content. Duplicates are bumped lower. Do not use the same content over and over again. True SEO success comes with judicious use of keywords in original content.