SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of increasing the ranking of your page or site on a search engine, usually Google. While you should naturally be looking at and including other search engines for your SEO techniques, Google often has much stricter rules (as people are wont to break them), so that’s what we’ll be mainly focusing on here. If you are using any of these tricks for SEO, you should stop – immediately.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Once upon a time, before Google’s algorithms were advanced enough, sites could simply pump their pages full of whatever keyword they wanted in order to increase their ranking on Google. Sometimes, this still happens, with some SEO “specialists” going as far as hiding the keywords in a text colour that matches the website’s background.
Big surprise – this doesn’t fly with Google anymore. If they suspect you are simply stuffing keywords here and there with density as the only goal, your site will simply be left off Google searches all together.
What you should do instead: Focus on quality content, with keywords worked in naturally, as part of the sentence. Your keyword(s) should appear once or twice in the beginning and then a few more times in the rest of the text. Your content needs to be readable – your audience is human! – so if it starts to become annoyingly keywordy, readers will probably go elsewhere.
2. Bad Keyword Choice
Keyword or keyword phrases that are too lengthy or contain “stop words” – words that add no meaning that Google will inevitably remove – are not good SEO practice. If people aren’t searching for the keywords you are using, what’s the point?
What you should do instead: It’s important to research your keywords first. What are people searching for in relation to your product? Keep it short, remove stop words and work the chosen keywords into your content naturally.
3. Slow Loading Time
If you click on a site with a slow loading time, what do you usually do? The answer is probably leave and find another site. Slow loading time is a major issue for your ranking, as Google includes page loading time in their algorithms.
What you should do instead: Get your back-end developers up to speed! Our team at Digital Freak can help improve your Melbourne SEO with this; just get in touch.
4. Buying Spammy Links
From time to time, you’ll likely get offers from apparent SEO specialists that offer to feature your links on their site for a weirdly low fee and incredible results. These are always a big no no, and Google is likely to catch on to what’s happening. Just don’t go there.
What you should do instead: Don’t ever buy or sell links! Work on premium SEO content instead to build your backlinks.
5. Only Optimising for Computers
One big mistake many marketing companies forget about is what devices their audience is using to access their content. Yes, your developers should be optimizing the site for desktop and laptop use, but forgetting about mobiles and tablets is a huge pitfall. If your site isn’t mobile friendly, it’s missing out on Google’s mobile first indexing.
What you should do instead: Get your site optimized for mobile, tablets, and other hand-held devices. Need help? Contact Digital Freak to optimize your mobile SEO.
6. Copying Content
There are two types of copied content: plagiarism and republished. The first is a big no no, for obvious reasons. Google considers re-spun content that is a blatant copy with a few changed words (often coming across clunky and poorly written) as plagiarised, and you can be punished for this in your Google ranking.
The second can be a good thing, in theory. However, if you re-post your content on another site, Google gets confused about which one is the original. In this instance, Google chooses whichever site has a higher ranking, and if that’s not yours, there’s your problem.
What you should do instead: Using techniques such as canonical tags are an easy way to credit the original author, and Digital Freak can help you suss out any other Melbourne SEO tricks, too. Oh, and don’t ever plagiarise content.
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