Bad Content for Your Site
One thing that I try to emphasize as much as possible is the need for quality content. Quality content gets readers to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your RSS feed, and link to your site. If you write something useful that provides excellent value and information to your readers you are going to benefit a lot more than if you write content that is low-quality. What exactly do we mean by low-quality? Here are a few examples.
1. Duplicate Content - Some site owners out there fill up their site with articles written for the article directories. These articles can be found using the exact same wording on several different sites, so why would someone link to the content on your site over someone else's? Why should Google rank you higher than another source? What's even worse is when you copy content from other site's WITHOUT the owner's permission or an attribution link. Not only are you giving off low-quality signals about your site, but you are violating international copyright law and could face some hefty fines.
2. Writing Content For Keywords - Most sites that know about SEO create content with the search engines in mind, but taking this to the extreme can cause problems. The Panda Update hurt sites that wrote content centered around specific keywords. These sites would pay writers to post quick, low-quality articles based on a specific keyword term with the hopes of achieving a high ranking. The search engine users would click on this high-ranking article, see it's junk, and back out to find a quality source of the information they were looking for. Finally, Google responded and harmed the rankings of sites that posted this kind of shallow content.
3. Fake Reviews - This kind of garbage got to be so egregious that the FCC had to step in and require sites to post affiliate disclaimers. Do not lie to or mislead your readers. People are smart enough these days to spot fake testimonials and frown upon sites that use them. Do not post reviews on products or services that you haven't personally used or know absolutely nothing about. It's going to come off as weak.
4. Unrelated to Your Product or Service - Google News can be a great way to drive traffic to your site, but a problem I have ran into when being listed in Google News is getting irrelevant traffic. You start seeing a flood of traffic come in from a keyword that is on the fringe of what your site is about and it drives you to write content that is further and further away from your core in order to get more visitors. The problem is that these visitors are going to be very low-value. You don't get paid for visitors and pageviews. You only get paid when people take action on your site. Post relevant content with a clear call to action on what you want the reader to do next. Posting an article about Charlie Sheen might get a lot of traffic, but won't get you many leads.