Ranking on the first page of search engine results is what most, if not all, businesses dream about.
If you’re one of the few who doesn’t see the importance of a high search ranking, conduct a search for a product or service your business offers to see how much of your competition appears before you do. If you don’t appear until after page three, chances are that you need some serious SEO.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process by which business climb to the top of search engine results. There are many factors that go into it; and if you’re a beginner, you might make some mistakes.
Here are some mistakes to avoid when DIYing your SEO.
Keyword Stuffing
No, it’s not the kind of stuffing you put in your holiday turkey.
Keyword stuffing is when you intentionally fill a webpage with a word or words in order to manipulate search engines into ranking you higher in search results.
You’ve probably seen these types of pages, the ones that use the same keyword five times in one sentence or so many times on the same page that it lingers in your mind like a subliminal message.
The fact is that search engines won’t rank this kind of spammy content. Using a keyword too often is one of the most common SEO mistakes and might prevent you from ranking well.
Copying Content
While republishing content that you wrote on your website elsewhere on the web can help your marketing strategy, you should take care in how you do it.
If the same content appears in more than one place on the web, a search engine won’t show it in search results because it can’t determine which version to index. The search engine will default to what is considered the most relevant, original content.
Careless Backlinking
You don’t want to backlink with just any website or content creator. You want to backlink with reputable sites that are relevant to the content you post.
Links from irrelevant sites will cause your site to be devalued by search engines.
When backlinking, you also want to avoid sitewide backlinks and pages with excessive external links. With that said, you don’t want to buy links either.
Buying Links
If you see emails promising a first-page ranking on any search engine, especially for a small amount of money, send them to the spam box.
While there are legit SEO companies out there, like Proximo Marketing Strategies, most of these emails are from companies looking to scam you. Even if they do buy links on your behalf, Google will blacklist your site for this.
Avoid the trouble and just don’t do it.
Hidden Text
It’s like an invisible ink message, except it’s on a web page.
Hidden text is the practice of hiding text on your website so that visitors of your site can’t see it, but search engines will still index it.
A simple way of doing this, for example, would be to change the color of this text to the same color as the background of your page. It becomes virtually invisible, that is until it gets highlighted. It could also be hidden in the page’s code.
Search engines will penalize you for doing this. Instead, put this energy into creating valuable, relevant content and take advantage of organic SEO tactics.
A well-optimized website should show up at the top of relevant search results, if you know what you’re doing, that is.
You wouldn’t have someone who doesn’t know the first thing about construction build your house. As such, you wouldn’t have someone optimize your search engine who doesn’t know anything about SEO, potentially filling your site with SEO mistakes. Proximo is a leading Virginia SEO company. If you would like more information on our SEO services, call us at (757) 504-2429 or fill out the form on our website.
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