There are plenty of SEO companies and consultants on the Internet that can help you out and plenty of free forums and guides that will give you the basics. Even if you do decide to use the skills and expertise of an SEO firm, it is still important that you at least know the basics of SEO so that you can also work with the company to make the results even better.

There are loads of things that you need to be doing within an SEO campaign, but there are also some things that you REALLY must avoid and we take a look at some of these below with our top ten things to avoid when running an SEO campaign.

Waiting Too Long - One of the biggest mistakes most people make is waiting too long to even begin an SEO campaign. If you have a website you should be running some kind of SEO, no matter how young the site is because a good campaign can help to get a higher ranking in the early days.

Targeting Competitive Keywords - If you sell houses then the chances of you getting to the top of Google for the keyword “houses” are going to be slim, to say the least. If you are working in an extremely competitive market, then you need to look outside of the box and start looking at easier keywords that you can rank for, because realistically, it is going to take a lot of time, effort and a little bit of luck to top the charts for the most competitive search terms.

Ignoring Long tail Keywords - Many people think that they should always go for the most popular keywords, but these often tend to be the most competitive, so you need to look at the long tail keywords. If you targeted 5 long tail keywords that all attracted 200 searches a month but were less competitive than one that attracted 1000 searches a month, you stand more chance of getting the traffic you want in a much shorter time.

Writing Rubbish Content - Content is king for Google and the search engine is so advanced and sophisticated these days that it can easily spot duplicate content and also poor quality content. The main aim is to write high quality content that is useful, informative and offers the user a good experience; else you will just be wasting your time and hindering your progress.

Publishing Poor Articles - Content on your own site is very powerful, but you should also look at writing articles and releasing them on some of the more powerful article directories like EzineArticles. If you are going to do this, then make sure you only publish good quality articles, otherwise they will be rejected and once again you will have wasted your time.

Spammy Blog Comments - Although blog commenting can be a good way to get relevant links back to your site, if you go around adding poor and unrelated comments, then this is only going to backfire on you in the long run. If you are going to comment on blogs, then make sure that you post quality comments on quality sites and check out the link follow status and the page rank / authority before you even begin.

Reciprocal Linking - Swapping links used to be one of the methods used for acquiring links until like most link practices it was abused and Google started to shy away from the weight it carried in rankings. Although it can be a good idea to swap links with local businesses or related businesses, do not waste your time swapping links and also limit the number of outbound links you have on your site.

Bad Link Neighbourhoods - Always avoid linking to or getting links from “bad neighbourhoods” – sites like gambling, adult and other sites that might be considered a little bit risque. If you are found to have loads of links on these types of sites, then you are going to be in trouble, so always make sure you are careful about where links are added to your site.

Ignoring Your Own Website - SEO begins at home in our opinion because if your website is rubbish, any extra traffic you generate will be a waste of time. Add to this the fact that if your meta titles and content are really poor, you are also going to lose out on ranking because two of the biggest factors when it comes to onsite SEO are meta titles and quality content.

Running Out Of Patience - SEO takes time – fact! You cannot expect to start an SEO campaign and get overnight results; it will take weeks, if not months, before you really start to get the results that you deserve if you run a good campaign. SEO should be an ongoing thing, running for as long as you decide to keep your website alive, because SEO is one of those things that goes on forever and is a constant effort.

Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO Web Optimization and Web Design company serving the Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales.

WordPress is one of the most robust and extremely versatile content management systems available. It might be used to make a basic blog site, or it can be used as the robust support driving your ecommerce business. What is really special about WordPress is that you are able to effortlessly design both kinds of websites without any help; even if you do not know anything on the subject of creating a web site or Html code. Still the greatest thing about WordPress is that it is amazingly Search engine optimization friendly. Here are some reasons why WordPress is one of the best content management systems for SEO.

1. Search Engine Optimization Friendly Permalinks: Permalinks are in essence links or URLs to your article. When you generate a post or article in WordPress, a URL is immediately created. WordPress lets you make URLs or permalinks that are made up of key words which search engines are attracted to. This allows for search engine crawlers to rank your site for the word of your choice.

2. SEO Compatible Article Titles: WordPress can be set up to automatically make the article titles a permalink. A keyword rich title utilized as a permalink to your internet site will make it simpler for you to achieve greater rankings in Google along with other search engines when people are searching for data or products that you are offering.

3. Allows You to Create Tags: Tags are similar to labels. Tags are found at the end of a article on any WordPress blog site and enable you to use keyword phrases to describe your post. At the end of this article you will likely see several words or tags at the bottom of the post such as “Word Press”, “WordPress for beginners”, or “WordPress for SEO”. These tags or key words will let the search engines web spiders better index your blog post which actually will assist surfers who are searching for information like “WordPress” or “WordPress for SEO” to find your website.

4. Lets You Cross Link Content: WordPress allows you to easily link associated content which helps with search engine optimization. Cross linking is where you create a link from one of your articles or blog posts to another relevant article on your website. Using this article as an illustration, I could create a link within this article that when clicked would bring you to a different WordPress article which you might find insightful. The link would be a keyword, or keyword phrase such as “learn WordPress”. This is another WordPress tool to help with your search engine optimization.

5. You Can Ping New Articles or Posts: Each time you post or edit either a posting or a blog page your WordPress web site can alert a range of different web sites that you have updated your web site. This is known as pinging and it is another very valuable aid that you can use to help your web site with getting ranked in the search engines.

6. Effortless Install of Google Sitemaps: Google Sitemaps has two important advantages for site owners. Not only can it help site visitors see a outline of exactly what they can find on your web site, but it helps Google to further index and rank your website by letting Google know exactly which blog pages are the most important.

7. Ability to Create Categories: Categories enable you to automatically arrange your content on your website. Think of categories like folders or maybe, a directory. A visitor to your internet site can find any article that you have ever published on your website, or any product that you want to sell easily because WordPress lets you assign a category. If you have visited websites where you can easily choose a list of subjects or products based on type, that website has set up categories. As you’ve probably suspected, search engines like it when website information is well organized and this will also help with the indexing of your internet site on Google, or any of the search engines. Quick tip: Use keywords that your audience is searching for as categories to make it simpler for people to discover you. Building a website that is SEO friendly is a snap because of the tools built in to WordPress.

If you want to make it easier to be discovered on the web, WordPress is definitely a powerful search engine optimization tool that you absolutely cannot do without.

Taylor Jordan writes for Tools For Social Media, http://www.ToolsForSocialMedia.com and Social Media For Business: http://socialmediaforbusiness.tumblr.com/ Check out more search engine marketing tips.