With so many people claiming to do SEO and offering advice on your site and how best to get your site to the top of the pile here are a few tips of things to avoid, and to watch out for your SEO company recommending.

Doorway Pages

A Doorway page is a method of spamming the search engines. Each Doorway is a single page that serves no other purpose that to redirect a search engine to the main site. Doorway pages and websites are highly optimised for a given keywords, high rankings can be achieved for this page, which will drive more traffic to the main site without having to over optimise the main site. Doorway pages are listed in Google's Webmaster Guidelines as something that they will penalise websites for.

Cloaking

Cloaking is another thing Google lists in the webmaster guidelines, and is where your website provides different content to visitors than to Search Engine Crawlers. For example if you provide information within JavaScript, which crawlers can't read, and then present different content to the Crawlers within the noscript tag, this is classed as cloaking, and a method of misleading search engines about the content on your site. Once again, this can lead to penalties for your site on Google and other search engines. Be careful if your website works with IP delivery as this can cause cloaking issues.

Keyword Stuffing

Your website should be focussed at the visitors you are attracting through your Search Engine Optimisation. Keyword Stuffing will not help you achieve this, as it over populates pages with repeated or irrelevant keywords. , on your pages and in the alt tags of your images, it can be tempting to repeat keywords excessively, believing that this will help the keyword density of your site. However, keeping your content readable and useful to your visitors this will also help search engines, as they crawl a site for sense as well as use of keywords.

On first glance these things may look like great fixes to get your site ranking highly on search engines, but they will only hurt your site in the long-run.

What text is on your site?

Why not test what text is on your site today? Using this SEO Browser tool you can see just the textual parts of your site - using this tool you can see what Google sees and also what text only browsers see when looking at your site. This tools also gives you a good overview of the text on your site, so if it's a bit keyword stuffed this will show clearly viewing your site with this tool.

These are just a few things to avoid on your website, the full Google Webmaster Guidelines offer more advice about what should and shouldn't be on your website.