The subject on SEO is a never-ending one and in 2021, a lot seem to have changed. SEO habits or tactics that used to work a couple of years back, seem not to work anymore. In some cases, still using the old method can get your website into trouble.
SEO is a topic that stresses many site owners. It is as easy as it sounds yet as hard as you’ll come to discover. And during this process of chasing for success, people end up adopting wrong habits.
These habits can leave you feeling sorry. Below are 8 SEO habits you need to stop in 2018.
Analytics are Everything
If you have been limiting yourself from benefiting from good SEO to only gain inflated amounts of free traffic then you need to change your approach.
SEO does not only help in attracting traffic, it is also an easy way to boost conversion. Not just boasting, but continuous traffic. Unlike paid traffic that tend to only last the time money is being spent, getting success with SEO will leave your business yielding results for free for a really long time.
To understand this, learn more about SEO techniques. You can get all the information you need on SEO and SEO techniques on sites such as https://serpbook.com.
By understanding your customers’ mindsets, you can use the keywords they use during search sessions and leverage on it. This will significantly move your page into among the top searches section. Tools such as Google Analytics or KISSmetrics help you to track keyword phrases that are highly popular for you to use.
Even in the case of picture search, having your keywords properly placed in the image alt tags helps your page showing up in the image search session on Google for specific keywords.
Point is, you want to focus on numbers. You want to focus on creating contents that people will love and actually search to read. What’s the essence of creating contents around keywords that no one is searching for?
Duplicate content
This is a habit whereby you post the same content in the same blog or sister blogs. There is no uniqueness in reposting the same content. It is also true that duplicated content is SEO unfriendly. Search engines do not consider such content as new or unique. Duplicate content offers no value to your readers and can easily chase them away for lack of new and unique content.
This habit should be stopped. Moving forward, learn to produce new content often. The content should be original, relevant and unique in manner.
Some webmasters tend to create contents over and over again around a particular keyword. While this might be interesting to do since it’s a topic they are enthusiast about, it can land them in trouble. Google frowns at duplicate contents which is often done to increase traffic. Create unique contents, not duplicate contents.
Local search optimization
This is one of the most highly ignored SEO strategies. This habit costs local companies and businesses vital traffic. To optimize local search, engage actively in local activities. These activities will help you build positive relationships with locals.
While engaging in such activities, share the media on varied social media platforms. Then encourage local people to engage your posts by commenting and liking. This will essentially improve your ranking in local searches of that region.
Spammy Guest Blogging
While guest blogging has proved to be among the best SEO strategies, it can be a potential for problems in some ways.
Years back, it was used to gain links. Spammy guest blogging is one of the many black hat techniques. Black hat techniques are used by lazy people who want the easy way out.
Using legit guest blogging can grow your business and enable it to be recognized as an authority in a particular niche. Guest blogging serves as a window to bolster your SEO as well as building inbound links into your site.
Additionally, it increases your control over the URLS and anchor texts for those links. This means that you can add a few links to some of your important web pages in each guest posts to also sell your site.
There’s a tendency to be selfish when writing guest blog posts. It is recommended that you write quality work even when it is published on another site. This is a strategy that can attract potential customers as well as traffic to your site. Rather than just creating guest posts with the intent of building links, create posts with the intent of helping people. Keyword should be quality.
Creating one page for each keyword variation
With the entry of semantic search, gone are the days when one page was optimized for a single keyword. The focus has shifted to the overall subject for each page. This helps to support themes inside a site.
There still remain people who use one page, one keyword approach and if often appears with local pages. These types of pages add little value to the users. Visitors need valuable content. This demands that there be no more boiler plate content.
Not fixing (or Identifying) harmful technical problems
If you do a number of technical audits for SEO, most websites have many technical problems that are unfixed thus affecting their search performance. While attracting links and producing content is applauded, if your website has underlying technical problems, your rankings will be negatively affected.
Here are the most common technical problems you should be on the look out for;
- slow page load time
- Improper redirects,
- Mobile errors,
- Duplicate content and
- Unintentional blocked pages.
In 2018, you need to stop this habit of carelessness and fix your site. The aforementioned issues will affect your rankings and deny you proper traction to your site. As you can tell, sites are founded on traffic.
Focusing on Keywords
With changing times, the world of SEO has undergone a dramatic change. Repeating the same keywords in text doesn’t cut it anymore. That is bad SEO and it needs to be stopped.
Stuffing keywords only alerts search engines that you are in the process of manipulating their algorithms. In the current world, you can be blacklisted by these search engines. To be effective, employ use of keywords in your titles. Also use keywords where they fit in naturally. An additional tip when using keywords, is using LSIs.
External content
Simply this is stealing someone’s original work without attributing it to them. Another term for this, is plagiarism. This can have adverse repercussions to your site.
With search engines becoming smarter, they can check for original versus duplicated content. Non original content on your site will affect your sites ranking.
You can easily recover from these habits because I have suggested ways through which to overcome each habit. Go through each and its remedy. As you will realize, the up side of these habits will propel you to success. In your new journey may you realize ultimate success.
