I run and own a small web design and SEO business in Dallas, Texas. I decided to open up a blog to start placing my thoughts and opinions about SEO and where its going and what works and doesn’t work. SEO is a slippery slope to say the least and it seems like every time I think I have it all figured out something new wacks me up side the head from one of the search Engines and I have to rethink everything I have learned in the past 5 years since I started doing this. I got started doing this for my own sites and after many, many, many trial and errors I have a pretty clear understanding of what does and does not work with SEO. I have tried just about every technique under the sun and several of the quick link methods that are listed out there. I think I will will kick off my blog with a list of things I have learned to avoid.  I have personally tried these out and found out they either do not work for SEO or your site ends up penalized when the search Engines figure it out.

• Do not sign up for any massive back links programs like gotlinks.com or any other similar program. They may offer you 5000+ back links, but I promise you the search engines are on to this and know when your site is utilizing these programs. I have had a couple of sites banned from MSN and Yahoo because of these programs.
• Do not buy back links from sites that obviously advertise that they sell links. They may have pagerank and they may be cheap but the problem is Google knows they sell links. The link may or may not pass on pagerank, but your site may very well be penalized from the top 30 and it may take months to recover.  I did this for a site of mine a couple of years ago and Yahoo completely de-ranked my site for 6 months. Hard lesson to learn.
• Do not cross link your own sites. You do not want to have 4 sites all linking to each other. Google figures this out quickly and will discount the links. Rather you should have each site linking to the other in a one way link scenario.
• Do no post your links to hundreds of blogs, forums and other link junkyards. There is nothing wrong with advertising your site where appropriate, but spamming active sites only ticks off the owners and spamming dead sites will only get you listed as a spammer. MSN actively seeks out honeypots where spammers do this and ban domains in these forums and blogs.

While this is not a complete list it does cover some of the fundamentals.  SEO is a skilled practice and more than anything requires someone with experience that knows what does and doesn’t work.