5 SEO Tactics That Will Get You In Trouble
Google is smarter than you think, especially when it comes to catching websites that try to trick Google to rank higher on search results. Also referred to as Black Hat SEO, these SEO strategies fall outside the ‘Google Webmaster Guidelines‘, and if Google identifies your website violating its guidelines (which it will sooner or later), your website will be harshly penalized. These punishments can range from listing your site as “low-quality,” dropping its ranking to the 100th page, or permanently retiring your website to ‘not found.’
Your website might be your business, and in many cases, your primary source of income. Thus, make sure you keep your website away from the bad company of these bad boys of SEO.
Bad Content Practices
Content is arguably the most significant factor for ranking a website. There are many good content practices you can follow, and many you should avoid. Here are a few of them that could get you in trouble.
Duplicate Content
One of the major ‘no-no’ of SEO is duplicate content. You might find an article on the web that seems relevant to your website, and you end up rewriting it and add a bit more content to make it better. Well, if you do that, cheer up because that is how content is formed. But, if you are copying and pasting paragraphs word to word without editing, it is plagiarism, which is wrong both ethically and legally. Search engine algorithms can easily detect plagiarism, and if you have a bunch of blogs with duplicate content, be quick to edit or remove it.
Reusing your own content is also a bad SEO tactic. Although it is not against the guidelines, similar content on multiple pages keeps the search engines from recognizing individual pages, which impacts the overall SEO of your website.
Content Frequency
If you post a couple of blogs per year and expect the magic to happen, it won’t. Google needs fresh content, and even if your blog written three years ago ranked on the first page of Google, it would eventually be replaced by newer blogs. Moreover, more content on your site gives it better opportunities to rank, along with adding to the authority of your website.
But, that does not mean that you start posting like crazy ten blogs a day. Although it is essential to be consistent with content, it is crucial to focus on quality because it is by far the most important ranking factor on Google. Your blog might rank on Google for a while, but if it is not good, its “bounce rate” will increase, which will tell Google that the page is not good enough.
Content Size
The final factor to keep in mind while posting content is its size. Be sure to create blogs at least 1,000 words in length. Writing 500-word blogs and expecting your website to rule the web is a childish thought you should get over with.
Bad Keyword Practices
Apart from content, keyword use is another crucial SEO factor. But, some bad keyword practices might get your website punished by search engines. These include:
Using One Keyword Per Page
A few years back, this is how SEO used to work — one keyword spread over multiple pieces of content — but now Google is smarter, and SEO is more competitive. Be sure to use, with your target keyword, other related terms, keyword variations, and synonyms in the same content.
Stuffing Keywords
Similarly, repeating keywords over and over again on your content is another bad SEO practice. Using a keyword unnaturally on a page will be easily noticed by the readers, which will simply turn them off. Additionally, your website will be no less than a naughty child in the eyes of the furious search engine.
Buying Backlinks
Backlinks also play a crucial role in your website SEO, along with determining the authority of your website. Backlinks can either be created through business partnerships or naturally for the sake of providing the readers with better access to detailed information. All these practices are good for SEO.
However, many companies sell backlinks, too, claiming that they would quickly increase your search engine rankings. Google’s algorithm includes consistent checking of do-follow and no-follow links to a website, and if it finds something fishy, the outcome would be bad and will ultimately kill your rankings.
Ignoring Google Analytics
Is your website not ranking on Google? Do you use Google Analytics? If the answer to both these questions is yes, it’s no surprise because effective use of Analytics and better SEO rankings go hand in hand. It is a free tool by Google and a very important one, which reports on each and every aspect of your website ranking from traffic to location to bounce rates. Be sure to use this tool to get ideas about what changes you should make in your website.
Not focusing On Mobile Users
Mobile SEO was not a big deal a few years back, but in April 2015, Google clearly stated that “mobile-friendly” would be a critical factor for websites to rank on Google. Therefore, make sure your website is mobile-friendly and loads fast on small screen devices. A few points to keep in mind while making your website mobile-friendly are:
- Don’t chase stunning design when building a mobile-friendly website; instead, focus on responsiveness and providing all the necessary information.
- You can have a separate mobile site URL but managing rankings for both the websites can be tricky. Choose wisely.
Final Thoughts: How Can Einfach Digital Help?
SEO is a prolonged process that needs to be followed throughout the life of your website. And, if you have been making these mistakes over the course of months or years, fixing them would be a challenging, time-consuming task.
Einfach Digital is a renowned SEO and digital marketing solutions provider that holds more than three years of experience in helping websites recover from bad SEO practices and dominating the search with white-hat SEO. Einfach can help you fix the existing SEO blunders on your website, along with applying robust SEO techniques to ensure sustainable search engine dominance.
