It’s a myth that SEO and good content are mutually exclusive. In fact, SEO carried out properly should go hand in hand with high quality content. Remember that the fundamental aim of Google is to return good quality, relevant content. With that in mind, here are three SEO sins that a certain to annoy your readers. Avoid at all costs!

Keyword Stuffed Content

By all means, use your keywords. But never at the expense of the sense of the article! Reread anything you write and if part of it sounds unnatural because you’ve overused a keyword, take it out. Repeating the keyword to the point that your article makes no sense it is spam. Your readers will think so and so might Google.

Titles that Make no Sense

Yes, we’d all like our main keyword in our title. But your blog post’s title needn’t be nonsense just for the purpose of getting it in there. If you’re using Wordpress, you can get the SEO All in One Pack, which allows you to set a page meta title different to your blog title. This means you can leave the SEO implementation to the All in one SEO Pack and your post title can actually be informative, catchy and make sense to your readers.

Harassing Readers for Links

Believe it or not, this does happen. I was personally a regular commenter on a blog about blogging. It was one I really liked, actually, as the blogger knew exactly what she was talking about and it was written in an approachable and enjoyable manner. She did make a post requesting that her readers link to her. This is no problem. But then she individually emailed everyone who had commented on her blog to ask them to link back to her twice within a week, each email with different justification for the pleas. Not so good. There were annoyed comments from some of her regular readers. If your readers like your site enough to link to you, they’ll do it. Begging them for links it only likely to alienate them. Notice I said that I was a regular commenter? I no longer read that blog.

These are just a handful of the tactics that some webmasters employ with a view to improving their SEO campaigns, but that can in essence become harmful to the user-friendliness of the site and overall enjoyment your readers. SEO is pointless if, once you get the readers, they instantly leave your site and never return.

[This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh of Tecmark SEO Manchester]