by Sheryl Jones, Senior Marketing Specialist at Uplers
The internet is an excellent resource for learning and acquiring knowledge. However, it is also a hotspot for half-baked truths and a generous sprinkling of lies. This problem often plagues popular, hot topics. And resultantly, you are stuck with information that has lost its fidelity.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one such domain that is dotted with misinformation. Individuals claiming to be “experts” are misleading the general user base to adopt poor or ineffective techniques. Unfortunately, the cost of treading into the grey areas of this practice can attract severe and irrecoverable penalties!
Since we believe that prevention is better than cure, here’s a lowdown on some of the worst SEO advice doing the rounds over the internet.
SEO is a One-Time Thing.
We get it, optimization is a hefty task, and you probably do not have the time or the energy to do it repeatedly. However, SEO is not something that you can do once and reap the rewards for the years to come. In fact, you may have to incorporate some changes overnight and let the others remain for a couple of months! Hence, you will have to modify your SEO strategy according to the ongoing trends and algorithms.
Get Your Keyword Stuffing Game On – That’s SEO.
Gone are the days when SEO was all about keyword stuffing. Keyword form only a minute part of SEO. It includes streamlining the front-end and back-end processes for enhanced website performance with due consideration for on-page and off-site SEO.
Additionally, Google has been stressing the importance of content quality over keyword integration. You should shape your content around semantics and natural language because they will play a crucial role in determining how pages rank in the search engine results page (SERP).
Mobile Optimization Can be Pushed for Later.
In the current age, when the world is consuming mobile content at an exponential rate, you simply cannot spare mobile optimization as an afterthought. Google has made it abundantly clear that it is transitioning towards the mobile-first website indexing model, which means that it should be your top priority! Ensure that your website and its elements are mobile-friendly right off the bat, and you will save yourself from the pain of reengineering everything.
Buy Links to Fast-Track Link Building.
Link building was supposed to be a healthy practice. However, when webmasters started exploiting this facility through link farming and link purchasing, Google decided to develop a watertight methodology through a list of “Dos and Don’ts” that reward natural link building and penalize the defaulters.
Google crawlers can differentiate good links from bad ones and determine the relevancy. Hence, focus on building highly relevant links from authoritative, reliable, and relevant sites within your industry.
Content Duplication or Spinning Helps in Short Term.
When you are already juggling several tasks at the early stages of web development, focusing on the content and content quality may not rank high in your list of priorities. In such a situation, duplicating or spinning the content may appear to be a lucrative option.
However, as stated previously, your content quality plays a vital role in controlling where you land on the SERP page. Thus, if you are posting sub-standard or copied content, your website will be flagged for low quality or plagiarism.
Optimize all Your Anchor Texts, Image Tags, Meta Descriptions With Keywords.
Newbies are often instructed to add every possible keyword combination in their anchor texts, image tags, and meta descriptions. However, you are still limiting SEO to keyword stuffing and falling prey to over-optimization while losing relevance. Therefore, give preference to relevance above optimization. Ensure that your anchor text, image tags, meta descriptions are concise, to-the-point, and relevant.
Catchy Titles Are In, Use Them by Hook or Crook.
These SEO hacks that will change your life!
Catchy blog titles, such as above, were enough to get clicks on your link. However, on seeing the stellar results, websites started using titles that promised the moon. On the other hand, the body of the content was underwhelming, to say the least. In an attempt to curtail this habit, search engines clamped down on click baits and penalized misleading headlines. It will damage your website reputation, which will take years to rebuild!
Black Hat SEO Will Keep You Competitive.
First things first, Black Hat SEO is unethical. SEO “hacks” such as cloaking, link stuffing, fake tags, invisible keywords, and generated content will undo all your ethical SEO efforts and irreparably dent your site reputation. Keep it clean, even though you do not get instant results, you are at least heading in the right direction!
SEO is All About Ranking #1.
As stated several times, one needs to have a holistic view of SEO and everything that it entails.
Almost everyone thinks SEO is about ranking, and that’s the one thing they get wrong. SEO goes beyond ranking, and is, in fact, about increasing conversion. Even if a website ranks at the top but performs poorly in conversion, it counts as an SEO failure.
You Do Not Need SEO Services.
From all the points noted above, you may have noticed so far that there is far too much misinformation circulating online. At the same time, you may have realized other SEO capabilities that you can unlock. Hence, even if you get a hold of the basics of SEO, your local SEO services company will always have industry experts that know better.
Also, once you have decided to invest in SEO services, you must avoid skimping on pennies if you want to make dollars. Cheap SEO services may not deliver on the promised results. In its place, invest in reliable SEO services with glowing reviews, proven track record, and impressive portfolio.
Conclusion.
As a result of this pollution, businesses miss out on valuable nuggets of information that can help them achieve their goals. On the contrary, even the most well-intentioned actions end up getting a bad rap.
Consume every information with a pinch of salt and verify everything before incorporating it into your SEO strategy. As a wise man once said, “Don’t just blindly believe everything that you read on the internet.”
Sheryl Jones is a Senior Marketing Specialist at Uplers – an affordable SEO services company. The company specializes in white label services in web development, web designing, digital marketing & marketing automation. She enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on web development and digital marketing best practices on the Uplers blog.
