When it comes to optimising a website for search engines there are a number of different strategies that can help you out. Some webmasters will spend hour after hour optimising their website only to see that they do not get the results that they desired. Below you can find some of the most common reasons why SEO fails for some and the major things that you should avoid during your search engine optimisation campaign.
Keyword Stuffing
By using the same keywords over and over again or using a heap of different versions of the word in your Meta tags will more often than not harm your search engine rankings. In this day and age, keyword stuffing is considered as spam by the top search engines and will surely not help your SEO campaign.
Over Optimisation
This is something you want to avoid all costs. Over optimisation is when your site is designed specifically for search engine optimisation and not for the visitor. Search engines are now able to detect when a website is over optimised and in turn this will lower your search engine ranking.
Duplicate Content
Be sure that the content on your website is informative and unique. It is also best to assure that it is related to your business. Copying content from other pages can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings. Also, by copying content from other websites you may be in breach of plagiarism laws.
Don't Target General Keywords
If your keywords are too generalised it will be quite challenging to be ranked highly for your particular phrase. For example, a small town real estate agency is going to have great difficulty ranking for the phrase ‘real estate'. It is best to optimise your website for specific keywords that will bring you plenty of targeted traffic.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique that is used in order to display a different webpage to a search engine spider than what your normal visitors will see. By using this technique you may see your search engine rankings disappear and you should always avoid using any form of cloaking.
Never Wait to Implement SEO
SEO considerations should be one of the first things that come up when planning a website. It doesn't really matter if you're launching a new website or upgrading an old one, you should be looking to implement SEO right away if you want to get a high search engine ranking.
Impatience
There is absolutely no point in checking your ranking daily. It may take a few months after optimising your website for you to have any results. If you use ethical SEO techniques with a little bit of patience you will have the desired result before you know it. Many webmasters give up after they do not see instant results and because of this they never actually get results.
Hiring an SEO Company
You should be quite careful when hiring an SEO company. This is far different to hiring a plumber to fix a leaking tap and you should always do your research. An SEO company will either help build or destroy your online business and you should always perform solid research and ask plenty of questions of the companies that you are considering.
Stay Involved
If you decide to hire a SEO company, it is best that you stay involved and learn as much as you can about the strategies and tactics the company is going to be using. If they decide to use high-risk tactics then you will have to pay the price if anything goes wrong.
This list of things not to do could go well beyond just the 9 that have been mentioned. However, these are a few very important things that you should consider in your SEO campaign and are sure to help you get underway.
Shout is one of the fastest growing online marketing companies in Australasia. Shout specialises in SEO, Search Engine Marketing, website conversions, usability testing and social media marketing. Not only do Shout SEO achieve top search engine rankings for the most competitive keywords, they deal in all things web that help maximise ROI on your website.