SEO: What not to do

[bnicolas]

Hello everyone,

I'm a complete rookie to SEO. I just had my sites built by REW now I need to start using them, so for the last couple days I've been consumed with learning about SEO. Wow,... so much info out there on what to do. I'm definitely going to hire REW to help me out as much as possible but for budget reasons I know I'm going to have to do some things myself. Trying to find out what I (or someone in my office) can easily do by ourselves in terms of regulary maintaining things.

I was wondering if you all could share with me what I should _NOT_ do as I've heard certain schemes will get you blacklisted from the search engines which would obviously be devastating. Any tips you all are willing to share would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

[AnnAnderson1015]

Once you have the site, the rest is fairly easy. It mostly consists of building a network of backlinks to your site. I've been able to get 3 of my sites to the top of Google ranking using the methods mentioned in this post.

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread32352.html

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread21261.html

[VRI]

What not to do... "set it and forget it". Optimization is an ongoing process. If you always view your site as a work in progress it's a step in the right direction.

There's a litany of others, that's just at the top of the list IMO.

[webmaster]

absolutely 100% unique (relevant and quality) content. (Copy paste and you might as well not start)

Do NOT participate in link exchange, scheme or paid links.

[bnicolas]

yeah, I actually saw the power of just that. I thought I was being long winded when I wrote my ietcapital.com/about.php page and I was going to get criticized by my colleagues for blabbering too much. When i search 'G' for "fha loans whittier,ca broker" though that page is actually on the 1st page of search results (3rd from the bottom) which was pretty exciting to me considering there is not 1 page on the internet that links to that page...

[bhartzer]

building a network of backlinks to your site

Ann is right, working on getting new links to your website every day is critical. Just make sure that those links somehow are related to real estate or to the city where you're located. For example, if you're going after "Dallas real estate" as a keyword phrase, then you would want links from Dallas websites and from Real Estate websites. Keep it all on-topic.

I would also do what's already been mentioned, focus on creating unique content for your website. Absolutely no copying and pasting.

[pinxer]

Build your links slowly. After several weeks, you can be more aggressive.

[RyanRE]

Like Morgan said, don't do reciprocal link exchanges. You are going to have a lot of people requesting link reciprocal exchanges, especially if you build any sort of PageRank. Either ignore them, or tell them to forget it.

[bnicolas]

The unique content part I understand and I understand that it is vital to build back links to my website but how do you do that if you don't:
1) pay for them
2) do the exchanges

And like you advise Ryan, I'm sure most webmasters of sites with any sort of authority feel the same way. Why would anybody with a decent ranking site want to give my new website a link? I guess thats where I'm unclear...

[RyanRE]

The unique content part I understand and I understand that it is vital to build back links to my website but how do you do that if you don't:
1) pay for them
2) do the exchanges

And like you advise Ryan, I'm sure most webmasters of sites with any sort of authority feel the same way. Why would anybody with a decent ranking site want to give my new website a link? I guess thats where I'm unclear...

You have to be creative

Link exchanges and paid links are both violations of Google's TOS. There are tons of ways to get links. To begin with, you could create a free REW blog and write some posts. You are allowed to leave a couple of free and non-reciprocated links to your website from each post. You could also just ask some of your peers that are in other businesses. You could write and submit articles. There are many, many creative ways to build links.