Four Seo Tactics To Avoid At All Costs
Research and planning are essential when developing your website’s SEO strategy. Best practices in the SEO community are always changing, and tricks that used to get you bumped to the top of the search results may be more likely to earn you a Google penalty today. Let’s take a look at some misguided SEO tactics that can do more harm than good.
Keyword Stuffing
It’s a well-known fact that shoving too many keywords into your content is an outdated technique that can harm your ranking; however, keyword-stuffed pages can still be found on many websites. Instead of making keyword density your top priority, work on creating informative, engaging content that your readers want to share. Scatter some related keywords and phrases throughout your content instead of repeating a specific long-tail keyword too many times.
Buying Backlinks
Building a good backlink profile isn’t a numbers game: quality trumps quantity when it comes to inbound links. The search engines give more power to backlinks that come from valid, authoritative sites. Bargain-priced backlinks found on sketchy sites won’t help you and are more likely to hurt your rankings. Your best strategy is to develop a small number of links from quality websites. Reach out to high-authority sites and blogs in your industry to ask for an inbound link, or try creating a guest post on one of these well-respected sites.
Publishing Duplicate Content
Having the same content show up on more than one of your business’s web pages can have serious SEO consequences. When the search engines attempt to index duplicate content, they’re unable to tell which copy to index. Most of the time, this type of duplicate content never appears in the search results. Take the time to create original content for every page of your business’s website: The SEO power of unique content will make the effort worthwhile.
Poor Mobile Design
Everyone knows that a good mobile site can help your business grow and flourish. In fact, a study conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau revealed that over 61% of users who visit a mobile-unfriendly site will simply move on to a competitor’s website instead. Not only will a mobile-friendly design help you attract and keep customers, but there are SEO perks to having a well-built mobile site: The existence of a mobile version of your site is now considered by Google when calculating the ranking of websites. In today’s mobile-driven world, a responsive website design that renders well on a variety of different devices is worth its weight in gold
It’s clear that some older SEO strategies that may have gotten great results in the past are ready to be retired today. The world of SEO is in constant motion, and it’s important to adjust your strategy to meet the changing standards and algorithms. Tactics that seem too good to be true probably are. By steering clear of some of these less-reputable methods, you can develop a solid SEO plan that will help propel your website to the top of the search results.
