Here’s 3 SEO Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process in which a website owner tries to improve the presence of their website online and to increase the visibility of it in the search engines.
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SEO can’t be covered in just a few paragraphs, but let me go into three SEO techniques that you want to stay away from. These techniques may have worked at one time, but they are now longer considered a ‘good practice’. Below is a brief overview of the SEO mistakes.
1. Keyword Stuffing
This occurs when a website owner tries to put their main keywords in multiple places all over the site and it doesn’t make sense. You may have read a website before and the article didn’t quite seem right. It didn’t flow and it just seemed weird. Chances are it was an article that was keyword stuffed. Either that or it was spun, but we won’t go into that.
Another thing that you see is a website that lists all the cities that they service, and then there is a link to the city and you click on that and there is some non-helpful, useless article talking about the city they service, stuffed with keywords. Not good. Do not do this. Google sees this as gaming the system and you will be penalized sooner or later.
Oftentimes the individual city pages have the exact same content with the exception of the city name. Once again, not good, and don’t do it. You’ll be sooner or later penalized.
2. Duplicate Content
Sometimes website owners or webmasters get lazy. They decide to ‘borrow’ content from another website and use it as their own. It is plagiarism plain and simple, don’t do it. Sometimes people will get creative and spin the content making it their own. You won’t be able to rank a webpage that you have duplicated from another source. If you can, it’ll be extremely hard to do so, besides, don’t you want to be able to express your individualism and uniqueness to your customers?
3. Low-Quality Backlinks
A backlink is a site that mentions your site with a link to your site. The more relevant links you have, the more Google sees you as a quality site. So, say for example, you are a painter and you have links from your local Chamber of Commerce, from an interview you did at a big local newspaper site, and one from Painting and Decorating Contractors of America.
Those links are seen as relevant, authoritative links and will be worth much more weight in your rankings that Google uses as opposed to links from a blog that you commented on, or from a random, brand new website that you posted an article on or even worse from a bunch of forum blasts spam links.
In closing, HIGH-QUALITY SEO is the only way to go. If you don’t know what you are doing, either learn properly or hire a professional that knows what they are doing. Performing SEO incorrectly can do much more harm than good. SEO for your small businesses is a big investment.
I understand, I am a small business owner myself. But it truly is an investment that will bring a positive return to your company provided you hire the right company. If you need any help with SEO services, don’t hesitate to contact me.