Forbes has once again decided to delve into the subject of SEO in order to shed light on what it’s cheerfully calling the ‘stupidest’ mistakes you can and possibly do make from time to time. Having identified the rather congested nature of the instructional side of the SEO literature market, the business gurus went ahead and addressed the less-explored side of what not to do to get by in online business.
And here are the five favourites…if you can call them that…courtesy of Forbes:
1 – Ignoring Analytics 
Number one foe a very good reason, to ignore analytics is as lazy as it is stupid. The reason being that when you have all the information right there in front of you, what’s the sense in not using it? All the data you could ever need to measure your ROI, determine what works and isolate what doesn’t is not only laid bare, but it’s 100% free of charge to access! You don’t have to pay for the software and nor do most businesses need to hire a dedicated analyst, so really, what’s the excuse for ignoring analytics?
2 – Lame Links
Awarded the silver medal by Forbes this time around was and is the practice of building lame links in an attempt to curry favour. If a link is not well-deserved and not hard-fought, it will not win any points with Google…in fact you’ll end up doing your site more harm than good. And it’s no good to stack up thousands of the things either and hope that a few pay off. They might, but the damage done by the other 2,997 will be so severe that your site will have taken a beating it simply cannot recover from. The most annoying thing of all is that of all the mistakes you could be making, this is one you’ve been warned of for years now!
3 – Poor Use of Keywords
Keyword stuffing used to be the best way of getting things done for millions of websites the world over. Sadly, Google declared war on the practice some time ago and won with relative ease. As such, we’re now living in a time where to stuff the same keyword or keywords into any bit of text over and over again is to take away any value it may have had and transform it into a lead weight that will drag your site into the ground.
4 – Too Little Conversion Focus
Here’s a question – what good is all the traffic in the world if nobody buys anything? The answer is of course no good at all, which is why another of the biggest mistakes you can make is focusing too much on the SEO to get visitors to the site and forgetting to pay any attention to converting them.
5 – Favouring Filler
Last but not least, Forbes gave special mention to the old favourite of content which is still seen by far too many web masters and SEO professionals as pure filler. Yes, you need a lot of content to get by, but at the same time crappy content is actually worse than no content at all. If it’s not worth saying and has no real relevance, you’re wasting your time by bothering with it.