The Guide to Hare-brained SEO Tactics that You Should Never Follow
Every online business and blog loves Search Engine Optimization (SEO); after all, in the world where everything comes at a price SEO is free. So you go on a hunt for SEO tutorials, tips, and tricks. With some dedicated learning and tenacity, your website is inundated with traffic and begins rising in search engine ranking.
What you don’t look for is the guide on how to mess up your SEO. Why would you, when you have no intention to. But unbeknownst to you, you’re inadvertently doing some things wrong, which are hindering your site from acquiring its optimal potential. Simply because you did not bother to learn about hare-brained SEO tips that you should NEVER follow.
SEO is always a work in progress; you can still learn and redress what you’d implemented. Sometimes there are just teeny-tiny mistakes, and with a slight tweak, you can get your site ranked with traffic converted.
So here you go.
- Mismatch of Content and Keywords
It’s not a smart strategy, rather a deluded one, if you think profuse production of content with no regard for your keywords is going to rank you.
When your target audience type in a keyword, they expect relevant content to come up in their results. So when you create out of context content, your audience is going to skip it. The search engine notices this and drops your rank in their results.
Also, the search engine does not appreciate going for generic content, trying to cover multiple topics so you could fit in the keyword, or trying to stuff several keywords in one post.
Search engines want the content to be user-focused in order to deliver the most relevant information for their search terms. Google looks for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) in your content, so adhere to that standard.
- Fondness for Wrong Keywords
If you’re wondering why your visitors are not converting, you might want to delve deeper into your keywords.
Scrutinize your chosen keyword’s CTRs, their search volume, and keyword difficulty. Also, segment them by their geographic locations as competition and volume will vary across that board.
If you’re offering a selection of internet providers to your customers, you may want to include keywords for the provider you’re marketing – one that is also popular in that region. For example, TWC Spectrum has an extended footprint in Austin, but is very sparsely available in Houston. So you will optimize for Spectrum related keywords for the Austinites.
Choose the keywords that are relevant to your audience, irrelevant ones are going to bring in traffic but, no conversions.
- Ditching Meta Descriptions & Alt Tags
You’re creating some authentic high-quality content and inserting targeted keywords. However, you do away with the Meta titles and descriptions, since who cares?
But the users care and the search engine does as well while crawling your site. Those top-ranking results, which the users love to click on, can attribute their allure to precise and persuasive Meta titles and descriptions. A Meta description between 50-160 words is ideal, exceeding that limit is going to get it truncated by the search engine.
Moreover, alt tags or alt attributes help search bots understand the context of your image content by providing a text alternative, and this in turn gets you indexed properly. In addition, these alt tags make images easily accessible to the audience when there are any browser-related obstructions.
- Neglecting Analytics and Audits
You’ve drawn out all your goals and sub-goals, and are diligently working towards lead generation and traffic amplification. But how do you know that incoming traffic and leads are actually valuable?
Analytics and regular site audits help you get into the nitty-gritty of SEO. Find out how much traffic is getting converted, which page has the most bounce rate, the most traffic from a certain location and its worth, the reason for slow site speed, customer funnel, broken links, duplicate content, and much more.
The information helps you streamline your SEO strategies and deter you from investing time and effort into unfruitful ones.
- Unfriendly Mobile Site
SEO is not solely restricted to optimized content and correct keywords, your website’s quality matters too, especially the mobile version of it.
About 52.6% of traffic comes from mobile, so if your site is not mobile optimized, all that content optimization isn’t going to be of any use, when the visitors are immediately leaving your site because it’s too slow or has weird interface.
The search engines recognize an unfriendly mobile site and reward you negatively in the SERP stakes.
The Endnote
While creating content, keep the users in your mind, not the algorithm. Any black hat technique, unintentional or otherwise, jeopardizes your reputation with search engines.
Search engine algorithms have increasingly become smarter and can sniff out anything fishy from a mile away. So do what the search engine asks you to, that is, prioritize your users.
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