When SEO Goes Wrong

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the developments of digital marketing over the past few years, now’s as good a time as any to learn that search engine optimization is one of the most effective ways to add visibility to a site. It improves your ranking on search engines, making it more likely that your site will appear to exactly the people that you want it to. However, it’s an ever-evolving art and the techniques that worked in the past won’t work anymore. There are also plenty of ways you can damage your ranking. Here, we’re going to look at when SEO goes wrong and what you can do about it. 

SEO

Back it up 

One of the most crucial aspects of succeeding at SEO is that your attempts to build yourself a position in the rankings is backed up by content. Content rules the web nowadays and it’s why so many small businesses are getting into blogging. However, empty, unoriginal and pointless content isn’t going to get you the kind of results that you’re hoping for. The more you try playing with topics and keywords that are near duplicates of one another, the more that the systems ruling search engine rankings will take notice. Similarly, loading your blog with pages less than 400 words can be taken as another indicator of low-quality content. 

Keywords aren’t the end-all and be-all 

By far, one of the practices that can hurt your SEO the most is the practice of keyword stuffing. Placing keywords in your content can be helpful, but many have taken it too far and attempted to throw every relevant keyword they can on a single page. Once upon a time, this keyword stuffing might have helped that specific page in the rankings. Nowadays, however, not only is it an unethical way to get a page that can’t be very high quality further up in the rankings. It’s widely caught the attention of search engines and will do more to negate your efforts than it will to help them. If you have keywords you want to hit, creating individual pieces of quality content for each of them will help a lot more. You can’t take any shortcuts to using the keywords you want. 


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Go meta 

Content is what matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Good content should be supported by good metadata. This is the information in the ‘back cover’ of the website, not usually accessible to visitors. Write fitting and informative descriptions in your metadata that hits the main keywords of the content as well. Note, this doesn’t mean that the metadata is the place where you can stuff as many keywords as you like. That gets noticed by search engines as well. WordPress sites and similar platforms allow easy access to forms for metadata, which can make it much easier for the less savvy site owner to add. 

Be careful who you partner with 

Search engine optimization isn’t just an important part of digital marketing. It’s become an industry in its own right with multiple teams helping businesses to fill up on ‘SEO juice’. This might mean optimizing a website, it might mean building internal and external links. But amongst the less reputable teams is the potential for fraud. Teams misusing metadata and keywords, teams who don’t qualify their leads, teams who produce low-quality content that can genuinely harm your rankings. A poor choice of partners can even lead to fraudulent buyers and sellers coming to the business, committing account abuse, referral fraud and more. There’s a seedy underbelly to the internet and you must be careful about avoiding it. 

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Build links 

The site itself isn’t the only thing that will help you build a quality site in the eyes of the SEO gods. Just as important can be the link-building that connects your site to other reputable sources on the internet. This is just another reason why putting effort into PR is going to help your business. Not only can coverage from reputable online sources such as Forbes, Entrepreneur and online versions of print media press help the brand. If they bring with them links that lead to existing, stable pages on your website, it also builds the ‘validity’ of the site in the eyes of search engines. Meaning that it becomes even easier to find. 

Stabilize the site 

Of course, link-building can also present a problem. Many sites evolve over time and some pages that were once valid may no longer be so. But these non-existent pages may still have many links leading to them. For external links, this is an annoyance and means you miss the benefit they have to your SEO efforts. But if you have internal links leading to broken pages, it can actively harm said efforts. Similarly, you need to check your site for dead links that lead to external pages, as well. Any sign of instability or dead ends in the site is going to harm your SEO ranking. Which means you need to diagnose it on a regular basis.

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Check your results 

Of course, none of the points above matter unless you’re getting an idea of how well, exactly, your efforts are going. Analytics tools provide some very in-depth methods of checking how your site receives visitors and how it competes in SEO. It should be used constantly to track your progress and see which keywords, which content, and which strategies are working best for the site. Keep a log of what changes you make when and compare it to the data. This is the most effective way of identifying correlations that can help you correct your step. Otherwise, you’re just going to keep changing things blindly without any real idea of what’s helping and what’s hindering you. That’s how you get into misinformed habits that have you spending more time and money on things that might not actually work. 

A knowledge of the basics of SEO, an eye for reputable services, and a focus on quality above all else is what’s going to help you rule the rankings. Shortcuts aren’t going to get you anywhere.

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