5. Do Nothing

Pretty simple right? Search engines are smart enough to know how often you are updating your site, and how often links are coming in. They are in love with fresh content, and will reward you handsomely for constantly posting quality content on your site. Doing nothing will cause your rankings to drop, and drop they will!

4. Duplicate Content

Taking content from your website, posting it as articles on other sites and article directories is a very ineffective way to build links. It is better to rewrite your content so that it is unique when you submit it to other sites online.

3. Buy 1000 Links

Kind of like a "get rich quick" scheme, it just doesn’t work anymore. Sounds good though, right? Getting thousands of links overnight ought to increase your rankings… Well, believe it or not, search engines are smart enough to identify the quantity of links your site gets over time and Google is looking down upon paid links now.

2. Keyword Stuffing

So you want to get a certain keyword ranked? Why not just stuff that keyword all through the page you want it to rank for, get a few links pointing to it with that keyword in the anchor text, and wallah! Trust me, search engines don’t like to be manipulated. They will catch on real quick whether or not you are stuffing your page with a certain keyword.  Vary the anchor text for heavens sakes!

1. Hire an Seo Firm

Wait a second! We are an SEO firm, why would I be saying that it will mess up your rankings? Ok, so maybe I need to be more clear. This should sound better:

1. Hire an SEO firm, WITHOUT doing your research.

Having a basic understanding of SEO, will help you to decide whether or not the SEO firm will really help your rankings. You’ll know what questions to ask, and what answers to expect. One important tip: If the SEO company tells you it will submit your site to search engines, stay away, stay far, far away! (Unless by "search engines" they mean "web directories")