SE-NO: 4 Tactics to Avoid When Optimizing Your Site for Search

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a crucial piece of your digital marketing strategy. Having a website is important, but if that website isn’t relevant, informative, or easy to use, the benefits of having a website are lost. You should continue to monitor and update your content to make sure your website is up to date, clear about what users can expect when they visit your site, and easy to navigate. But you also need to ensure that your content is optimized to be easily indexed by the search engine’s crawlers.

1. Ignoring it & hoping your website will rank well.

SEO is extremely important in determining how your website ranks in search results when users are searching for products or services that you offer. And because it’s so important but technical and requires a lot of attention to detail, it can be tempting to just let it go. Don’t. There’s a lot of training materials or webinars out there on optimizing your website and its content for search. Find some time (or someone) to dedicate to it, and you’ll be happy you did.

2. Using blackhat techniques to game the search engines.

Over the years, businesses have tried to find ways to trick the search engines into ranking their website higher in search results through the use of “blackhat techniques”. And every time they’ve tried, they’ve been caught and penalized by the search engines. These techniques are a waste of time and resources when you should be focusing on improving your content or products to drive traffic and sales.

3. Using paid links or link farms.

One of the blackhat techniques that the search engines don’t allow is link stuffing. This is inserting links in hidden text throughout your website in order to try to improve your rank in search results. Having internal and external links on your website establishes credibility and allows users and the crawlers to easily move through your site. Paying for other sites to have links to your website or getting involved with link farms is not the way to do it.

4. Stuffing in keywords or providing bad content.

The best things in life are earned through hard work and dedication, and the same is true for your website’s place in search results. The point of utilizing SEO to rank well is so that users can find your useful and relevant content. Another blackhat SEO technique is stuffing keywords into your copy so your page might rank higher for search results involving that keyword, but your website is essentially unreadable.

If you’ve taken the time to develop a brand or product that you want to share with an audience, it’s important to think about all drivers of your marketing strategy to get it into the market. One important driver is your website and ensuring it’s optimized for search engines is crucial to your success. And the great thing about SEO is that once it’s done, it requires little to no maintenance on your website. As you add new content, you’ll want to optimize as you go, but existing pages that don’t change very often just require periodic reviews to make sure it’s still accurate. You want to make sure you don’t ignore it and that you don’t use any blackhat SEO techniques that could result in your website being penalized by the search engines.