These misconceptions create a lot of confusion about the correct SEO practices that will enable you to achieve results and the wrong practices that will just waste your time and other resources. SEO is important to any website and it cannot be ignored especially if you want to get the most out of your website. This has led to the rise of several bad practices. Here are 9 SEO practices that just aren’t good:
1) Duplicate content
You need to be very careful about the content that you create and post on your website. Ensure that everything you post as the content is original and is not similar to any other content or page on the internet. Duplicate content is bad for your SEO efforts. This is because the search engines already have a similar content in their index and as such the search engines will not index your website for ranking since there is nothing new in it.
2) Just create great content
This sounds like it is a great piece of advice right? Well, this only works if you have a vibrant audience. With a big community or audience and one that can share your content and the same content be shared over and over, your great content will not help you. You need to first build a community and then keep the community engaged with the great content. This way, the community will feel the need to share the content and this will bring more visitors to your site and the search engines will rank your website based on the traffic visiting it.
3) Keyword stuffing
The use of keywords in your content is good for search engine optimization but repeating the same keywords over and over (keyword) stuffing is a bad SEO practice. Spreading the same keywords all over your page will not only discourage your visitors from reading the content, but it will make your content look spammy and the search engines will easily detect this and they will not rank your site. You should use your keywords sparing for instance, once in the title, description, in the opening paragraph and a few times in the body where it fits naturally.
4) Guest posting for links
Guest posting is one of the best ways of getting backlinks to your website. However, not all backlinks are beneficial to your SEO efforts. If done in a wrong and cheap way, back links can significantly damage your website’s rankings. If you want to guest post and get back links that will help in your search engine optimization efforts, ensure that you guest post for high-quality websites.
5) Accepting low-quality guest posts
Creating and publishing content on a regular basis is an invaluable SEO practice. Once in awhile, you might feature a new writer on your website by publishing his or her content. However, you must do due diligence to go through the content personally to ascertain its originality, relevance, and usefulness for your audience. Do not just accept guest posts that are of poor quality and do not offer any value to your audience.
6) The use of too many ads above the fold
Use of ads on websites is a way many site owners use to create revenue. Unfortunately, some people do not understand that using too many ads especially above the fold, the part of a webpage that is visible without scrolling is just not good. The use of such ads affects the page layout algorithm which in turns affects how search engines especially Google ranks your website.
7) Buying links or paid links
You may have heard or seen adverts about buying links and likes on the internet. Well, some people prefer this method to building their own natural backlinks. Unfortunately, you might register some success at first but all your efforts will be wasted once Google detects that you are using paid backlinks. In fact, it will take you a lot of time and even money to get to where you were. Therefore, take your time and invest in building a website with valuable content that will create natural sustainable backlinks.
8) Slow websites and unavailable websites
This is a very bad practice especially if you want to gain from SEO. Your website should load in less than 4-5 seconds and it should be available 24/7all day every day. For starters, a slow website is discouraging and annoying. Internet users search and open websites that open fast and are available at any time. And if something happens to your website ensure that you fix the problem in the shortest time possible. This calls for investing in a good website hosting service provider. You can also use a website builder or software like WordPress that will help you build a fast site that loads fast. If you must use the services of a paid web host ensure that the company is available 24/7 and can be reached easily in the case of a problem.
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8) Slow websites and unavailable websites
This is a very bad practice especially if you want to gain from SEO. Your website should load in less than 4-5 seconds and it should be available 24/7all day every day. For starters, a slow website is discouraging and annoying. Internet users search and open websites that open fast and are available at any time. And if something happens to your website ensure that you fix the problem in the shortest time possible. This calls for investing in a good website hosting service provider. You can also use a website builder or software like WordPress that will help you build a fast site that loads fast. If you must use the services of a paid web host ensure that the company is available 24/7 and can be reached easily in the case of a problem.
9) Optimized anchors
The use of optimized anchors is an outdated SEO practice, which, if used today you will be penalized for it. An optimized anchor is basically the use of texts that have keywords meant for ranking the site. For example, if a website wants to rank for the keywords “top mobile phone”, it will use the anchor text top mobile phone to link to its mobile phone website. Google banned this and termed it as a link scheme to cheat Google algorithms to pick and index certain words for the sake of a particular website. If you do this today, Google will penalize you and your website will not be ranked.
If you want to achieve website success today, it is vital that you follow good SEO practices that are based on Google standards, that are ethical and that follow the various developments of ranking algorithms. Good search engine optimization practices will go a long way in ensuring that you get the most out of your website and that your website is ranked among the top searches on search engine result pages (SERPs)
