There are a lot of suggestions out there about how to promote your site and how to improve your SEO. I am guilty as well as others, as I have in some cases not explained what you should not do along with what you should do to improve your site.

And so, here are some Do’s and Don’ts of SEO:

Do: Create a blog for your website, sharing knowledgeable information with the readers.

Do Not: Talk about personal endeavors like parties you’ve been to, or gossip viciously about people. You should also refrain from political or opinionated comments. You want people to respect you, and come to you for professional advice.

Do: Create social networking profiles on such likes as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.

Do Not: Post inappropriate pictures of yourself or others, or talk about personal actions like drinking or being mad at someone or something. You don’t want people to search for you and find ridiculous and degrading pictures of yourself. You may not care when you first put up the pictures, but you will when someone finds them.

Do: Comment constructively on other people’s blogs to help reinforce backlinks and get people interested in visiting your site.

Do Not: Spam blogs relentlessly with material that may or may not pertain to your site. Links will be created, but this will ultimately result in your site being blacklisted as spammy. Developing good and honest backlinks is the only way to go.

Do: Add images and pictures to your website to help enhance the appearance and appeal of your website.

Do Not: Include pictures that have nothing to do with the material of your website. Pictures of your cats and dogs or baby on a website for ecommerce will not entertain people, but rather confuse them as to whether the site is legitimate or not.

Do: Consider and even use Flash animation on your website to promote interactivity and intrigue amongst the visitors.

Do Not: Put huge Flash animations on your website that distracts from the real content, or make your whole site out of Flash animation. Search engines cannot crawl these sites very well and the sites often take far too long to load for people on slower internet connections. Flash is meant to enhance your website, not bog it down.

Do: Be sure to supply at least two ways (links) to get to one place, so people can more easily find it.

Do Not: Put so many links that people get frustrated because they think they are maybe going to a different page, but keep getting shoved onto the page they’ve already seen. You also want to make sure all of these links are consistent through the site. If the text and image are linked on one page, do it for all of them. People like big buttons, and if they suddenly notice you can click the image to get to the same place, they are going to go for the big obvious image and not the little text one. This does not mean you should exclude text links, this only means it’s important to supply options to the visitor.

It’s very important to as much research on a subject as you cane before you get started. You will have a much better idea of what you should be doing and what you should not be doing if you read up what you’re planning. Think of it like bungee jumping – you need to know all of the do’s and don’ts of bungee jumping or may not make it through the end. Though not life threatening, it’s the same for SEO. If you don’t pay attention to the do’s and don’ts, you’re simply not going to make it.