Do you write a blog?
Are you doing content marketing to promote your business?
If so, you probably have learned about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
SEO is a list of various strategies to make your content more readable and helpful to both the readers and the search engines.
However, some of the SEO tips are very spammy.
In the past, some websites use these spammy SEO tips to cheat the search engine and steal a higher rank on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
But as the evolution of the search engine algorithm, most of these scammy SEO tips were recognized.
For the websites that used these scammy SEO tips, they got punished with lower site rankings.
In this article, let’s take a look of these SEO mistakes that you should avoid!
Don’t buy backlinks.
What is backlink? Backlink is the link in another website that links to your website.
What’s the relation between backlinks and SEO? The more backlinks you have, the higher your website’s domain authority is. And thus, it benefits your website in the SEO competition game.
In the scientific world, the more citations a journal have, the higher impact factors it get.
In the internet world, the more backlinks a website have, the higher domain authority it has.
However, don’t jump into the game of buying backlinks.
Building up domain authority can bring huge impact to any website or business. And there’s also some industry appears that charge you money to give you some backlinks. They mention your website for the reason that you paid money, but not for the reason that you really made some great contents that are worth spreading. Google have noticed this phenomenon, and are giving SEO punishment to these website and low-quality backlinks. Instead of increasing your website’s domain authority, buying backlinks may actually do harm to it.
Don’t write low-quality content.
Content is king. In the world of content marketing, only the high-quality contents win the game.
Good contents provide real value to the readers.
Good contents make readers want to stay and read more contents.
Good contents help you rank in the search engine and bring more readers to you.
Bad contents are spammy, consist of clickbait titles, useless contents and annoying excessive ads.
Bad contents push readers away and spoil your brand.
Bad contents are poison that will never make your website success.
Don’t do keyword stuffing.
Keywords are the words that people type into the search bar.
Keywords bring people to the search engine result page, and bring them to your website.
Keywords are the connection between your blog post and your reader.
However, some people made the mistake of keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing means that you put a lot of irrelevant keywords into your content.
You expected to get more page views by inserting a bunch of keywords.
But the search engine algorithm can easily recognized this behavior.
Thus, doing keyword stuffing will actually make your website get negative SEO effect.
Don’t do keyword stuffing.
Don’t be a copycat.
Don’t copy content from other people’s content.
Don’t just replace phrases and still making a similar content.
Don’t be a copycat.
Google know it and Google don’t like it. Readers don’t like it, either.
What you should do is making original content.
Make high-quality content that you can’t find it anywhere else.
Make your website special, helpful and original.
Don’t be a copycat.
Don’t overdo internal linking.
Internal linking means inserting the links of your other contents in your current content.
Like in these post, I’ve been mentioning content marketing and insert the link to another piece of post.
These strategy are helpful to let readers stay longer in your website.
It also help readers to read more about something relevant to the topics.
However, don’t overdo it.
You should only insert the links that are relevant to the contents.
You should also limit the amount of link that you insert in a post.
If you are overdoing it, the search engine may label you as a “link farm.”
It may assume that you are inserting lots of irrelevant links and bothering the readers too much.
Summary
So these are the common SEO mistakes that people may make. Let’s recall:
- Don’t buy backlinks.
- Don’t write low-quality content.
- Don’t do keyword stuffing.
- Don’t be a copycat.
- Don’t overdo internal linking.
Hope this post are helpful to you!