Implementing an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is crucial to improving the visibility of your company’s website and ranking higher in the search engines. But that doesn’t mean that all SEO practices are beneficial. In fact, using the wrong SEO practices can lead to your website being temporarily or permanently banned from the search engines, which will cripple your online marketing efforts.

Here are three ways that SEO can hurt your search engine rankings:

Linking to Bad Neighborhoods

On the Internet, linking to other websites is akin to being a good neighbor. If websites didn’t link to each other, we wouldn’t be able to easily browse from site to site to find what we’re looking for. Each website would essentially be isolated from the rest of the world. But linking to other websites goes beyond simply being a good neighbor; it’s also beneficial for search engine optimization purposes. Search engines like to see outbound links to other sites, but those sites you are linking to must be related to your niche. Linking to many unrelated sites or worse yet, linking to "bad neighborhoods" can severely damage your search engine rankings.

Bad neighborhoods are essentially websites that have been banned by the search engines or who engage in questionable or illegal activity, such as spamming, distributing Trojans and other negative behavior.

Link Exchanges Can Be Harmful

Link exchanges can also be a very bad SEO tactic when it comes to your search engine rankings. With link exchanges you are essentially saying "If you link to me, I’ll link to you." The idea of course is to gain backlinks and by doing so, increase your search engine rankings. But you have to be extremely careful in choosing who you swap links with. Swapping links with websites that do not have a good reputation with the search engines will cause far harm than good. Only swap links with high quality websites that are related to your industry or niche. However, as a good rule of thumb, don't engage in link exchanges.

Keyword Stuffing

Another way to destroy your search engine rankings is by going overboard on keywords. Normally, using keywords is a good thing when it comes to improving your search engine rankings. But overzealous use of keywords will have the opposite effect. Search engines are constantly improving their algorithms and they are now smart enough to identify websites that are stuffing extra keywords into their content in an attempt to game the system. In other words, don’t do it.

Remember, when it comes to search engine optimization, you’re better off doing nothing than doing the wrong thing. Using bad SEO practices like those discussed above can easily derail all of your online marketing efforts and damage your search engine rankings permanently.