The Do's and Don'ts of SEO

The do’s and don’ts of SEO come down to one principle: build pages that genuinely help people, and make it easy for Google to find, understand, and trust them. Everything on the do side of this article serves that principle. Everything on the don’t side tries to shortcut it, and shortcuts are what get sites into trouble. I’ve practiced white-hat SEO since 2015, and the sites that survived every algorithm change I’ve lived through were the ones that stayed on the right side of this list.

Google publishes its own foundation for this in Google Search Essentials, which covers the technical requirements, the spam policies, and the key best practices for appearing in Google Search. I treat that documentation as the baseline for my work. The guidance below is my practical reading of it, organized into the four areas where site owners make the best and worst decisions: content, technical SEO, links, and AI tools.

The Centerpiece: Do This, Avoid This

That block is the whole philosophy in miniature. The sections below unpack each area, because the details are where sites actually go wrong.

Content: Do the Work That Helps Readers

Good content starts with intent. Do research what the searcher wants before you write, and structure the page to answer that need early and completely. In my own practice that means working from a brief, covering the topic’s central entity and its attributes in full, and writing sentences with real specifics: names, steps, numbers, and conditions. My SEO content writing process follows exactly that order, research, brief, draft, then optimization.

Do add information gain. A page earns its place when it gives the reader something the existing results don’t: first-hand experience, a clearer method, a worked example, or an honest account of limitations. Also, do keep content current. Reviewing and improving a published page is normal, healthy SEO, and Google Search Central documentation encourages creating helpful, reliable, people-first content that stays accurate over time.

Don’t publish thin pages. A page that repeats a template with a swapped keyword gives the reader nothing and, at scale, falls under what Google’s spam policies describe as scaled content abuse. Don’t keyword stuff either. Repeating a phrase in every heading and paragraph makes writing worse for humans, and modern Google does not need it to understand a page. Moreover, don’t copy a competitor’s structure and wording and expect to outrank the original. You are offering Google a second copy of something it already has, with no reason to prefer yours.

Don’t write for a word count. Length is a result of complete coverage, not a target in itself. A short page that fully answers a narrow question beats a long page padded with filler, every time.

Technical SEO: Make the Site Easy to Crawl and Use

Technical work has one job: remove obstacles between your content, Google’s crawlers, and your visitors. Do make sure important pages are crawlable and indexable, with a clean internal link structure that lets both users and crawlers reach everything that matters within a few clicks. Do use descriptive URLs, correct canonical tags, and a sitemap that reflects your real, live pages.

Do take mobile seriously. Most searches happen on phones, so a page that overflows the screen, hides content behind awkward spacing, or makes buttons hard to tap is broken for most of its audience. I hold a simple standard on every site I build: no content or spacing may sit outside the screen on mobile, and a user should be able to find everything easily. Do keep pages fast as well. Compress images, remove unused scripts, and test on a real mid-range phone rather than trusting a desktop preview.

Don’t block important resources in robots.txt by accident, and don’t let duplicate versions of pages compete with each other. Don’t chase technical tricks that exist only for crawlers, like hidden text or cloaking, which Google Search Essentials lists among spam behaviors. Also, don’t rebuild your whole site every time traffic moves. Technical changes should fix diagnosed problems, not express anxiety. If you need a structured check of these issues, that is exactly what a technical SEO audit is for.

One more practical point: don’t ignore the basics while chasing advanced tactics. A missing title tag, a broken internal link chain, or accidental noindex on an important page will cost you more than any advanced schema project will gain you.

Links: Earn Them, Never Manufacture Them

Links still matter because they are how the web expresses trust and relevance. Do earn them by publishing content worth citing: original guides, useful tools, clear research, and pages other writers naturally reference when they explain a topic. Do pursue genuine outreach and digital PR, where you contact relevant sites with something that actually benefits their readers. Do build internal links thoughtfully too, connecting related pages with descriptive anchor text so readers and crawlers understand how your content fits together.

Don’t buy links. Paid links that pass ranking credit violate Google’s spam policies on link spam, and the risk sits on your site, not on the seller. Don’t join link exchanges, private blog networks, or schemes where sites link to each other in patterns built only to manipulate rankings. Don’t use exact-match anchor text everywhere either. A natural link profile has variety, because real people link in their own words.

I have seen sites gain traffic quickly on manufactured links and then lose it all in one update, with a long cleanup ahead of them. However slow honest link earning feels, it compounds. A link earned because your page is genuinely the best reference stays valuable for years.

Using AI Tools: Assist the Expert, Do Not Replace One

AI tools are now part of normal SEO work, and I use them myself. Do use AI to speed up research summaries, outline options, headline drafts, and first-pass editing. Do use optimization tools on finished drafts as a coverage check. I run most of my drafts through SurferSEO for that purpose, and AI assistants can play a similar supporting role when a human expert directs them, verifies every fact, and rewrites anything that sounds generic.

Don’t publish raw AI output. Unedited generated text tends to be vague, repetitive, and occasionally wrong, and it carries no first-hand experience, which is exactly what readers and Google’s quality systems look for. Don’t use AI to mass-produce hundreds of near-identical pages. That is scaled content abuse under Google’s spam policies regardless of whether a human or a tool wrote the pages. Therefore, the rule is simple: AI can assist the work, but a knowledgeable human must own the facts, the structure, and the final wording of anything that carries your name.

Final Thoughts

The do’s and don’ts of SEO are not a mystery, and they have been stable for years even as tactics around them changed. Create helpful content, keep the site technically sound, earn links honestly, and use AI as an assistant rather than a replacement for expertise. Sites that follow those rules rarely fear updates. If your site has drifted into the don’t column, fix it in that same order: content first, technical health second, links third. That is the white-hat path, and in my experience it is the only one that keeps working.