The difference between Bad SEO's and Good SEO's

There are lots of different types of SEOs out there and the more I look around the more I see people doing the same things over and over that just don't do anything and are irrelevant. Here is a list containing what bad SEOs do and what good SEOs do.

It should be noted that this list is primarily focus on Google and of course is my opinion. If I'm wrong please leave a comment and we can discuss.

Bad SEOs

  1. Don't research keywords
  2. Don't find areas of advantage in keywords
  3. Don't pick high traffic keywords
  4. Don't understand the competition of keywords
  5. Don't focus on actual traffic
  6. Don't care about conversions
  7. Religiously are concerned with PageRank
  8. Think alt tags should be "optimized"
  9. Think it can all be done fast
  10. Think any keyword is possible to win
  11. Think there really is a secret formula that applies to every site, despite the category or situation
  12. Think that because a competitor is doing it and winning it must be right
  13. Think it’s a numbers game and not a quality game
  14. Are only concerned with the past and present state of SEO and don't look to the future of where it's heading
  15. Submit sites over and over to the search engines
  16. Start off way too big
  17. Always bite off more than they can chew (and never chew it)
  18. Only win long tail keywords (and moreover long tail keywords that get NO traffic or conversions)
  19. Think winning the company name is a great start
  20. Think keyword density matters
  21. Think their should be a precise amount of content per page
  22. Think a sitemap is the answer to all linking and indexing problems
  23. Don’t even take into account information architecture
  24. Try to win multiple distinct keywords with one page
  25. Care about HTML validation, yet still have very invalid pages
  26. Take on huge search terms with 10 page sites
  27. Think its important to change EVERY image to text as if having one or two new words to index will do anything at all
  28. Think Flash hurts rankings
  29. Think they can optimize Flash sites
  30. Optimize about us pages
  31. Spend 99% of their time with on-page factors
  32. Think Javascript hurts rankings
  33. Think tables hurt rankings
  34. Still even mention META tags
  35. Think they can win "loans" for $1,000

Good SEOs

  1. Immediately try to understand realistic goals
  2. Don't over-promise
  3. Over-deliver
  4. Understand that SEO is not the only way to make money online
  5. Understand that commercially oriented sites are at a disadvantage
  6. Understand the power of baiting links with a quality site rather than 1000s of spammy emails
  7. Build authoritative resources
  8. Connect relevant and useful content to the query
  9. Essentially "build" the web, rather than optimize it.
  10. Have experience
  11. Are directly connected to successful web sites
  12. Can estimate fairly accurately where a site will end up
  13. Understand the power of a community and users
  14. Are very technical with the web to begin with
  15. Don't get caught up with tiny and arbitrary on-page factors
  16. Focus on the user just as much (if not more) than the search engines
  17. Find ways to innovate and fill needs
  18. Look for niche areas to work in
  19. Create extremely well thought-out and organized web sites
  20. Build their own sites

Comments (3)

by slayerment UR10 50 weeks 6 days ago

Thanks for the reply Malak. Do you have any examples of tables hurting search rankings? I have never seen such cases.

by Malak UR6 51 weeks 2 days ago

thanks for this amazing list slayerment..
but i think that tables hurt rankings indirectly, also the meta description is where the search engine takes his (snippets) from..

by shaykai UR9 1 year 1 week ago

Fantastic list!