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Saturday, April 13, 2013

3 SEO Tactics That Can Ultimately Backfire


Guest Post By Anny Solway
 
Just a few years back it was very easy to throw together a quick website and get a great page rank on Google and other major search engines. You used to be able to create a site, write a few pages of quick content, and fill it with keywords. A simple site like this combined with a few easy SEO strategies used to be enough to get strong search engine results. Many sites were designed for search engine spiders crawling through pages to determine page rank, not for the people that would eventually stumble along the pages.

Spam and garbage-filled websites are an easy way to quickly turn off site visitors. In recent years, search engines have been changing their page ranking algorithms to place more of a priority on good content and decrease the amount of spam and garbage that show up in search engine results. This means that some SEO approaches may now hurt your ranking more than help. Here are a few strategies that could potentially do more harm than good.

Keyword Stuffing

Incorporating keywords throughout your website is an important SEO strategy. Taking the time to research the top keywords and search queries in your niche will go a long way in helping you create a site that is search engine friendly. However, some people take their keyword usage too far, and overstuff all of their written content with keywords. If you have used your keywords so frequently that it makes reading the content difficult, this is not a good use of SEO. The same principle applies when using awkward keyword phrases that stick out like a sore thumb in your text. Remember that good SEO is ultimately about balancing between what is good for search engines and what is good for potential readers of your site.

Article Writing

Promoting your website through submitting articles to other websites can be a great SEO strategy, but it can also backfire on you. The trend of quality over quantity applies here as well. A proper use of this strategy would be taking the time to build up a strong website, then writing thorough articles that would be a valuable resource to people in your niche or industry. This type of approach would actually be an excellent way to boost your SEO and help encourage more people to read your site at the same time. The wrong way to approach article writing is by writing hundreds of keyword filled, barely readable articles and submitting them to article directories with little to no quality standards. Writing poor quality articles for the sole purpose of boosting your page rank is not a good SEO strategy. It interferes with your most important end goal—having a good website with lots of regular visitors and a steady stream of new traffic.

Making SEO the Primary Focus of Your Website Design

SEO is definitely one of the more important things to consider when creating a website, but it is not your only priority. You do not want to allow your focus on SEO to take away from your other priorities. If your goal is to have a successful website, you need to focus on creating a good experience for your visitors. SEO will help you get people to visit your site, but they won't stick around if you do not have a well-designed site with good content. Use premium WordPress templates to create a strong website first. Then you can direct your focus using SEO strategies to build your site, like using keywords in your title tags, menus, URL and more. As long as your approach to SEO complements the quality of your site, rather than getting in the way of it, you shouldn't be worried.

About Author

Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress templates that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.

3 comments:

  1. keyword stuffing is considered as a black hat technique today

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Keyword Stuffing is not ethical but in one way it is done by all of us who are concerned about SEO of his/her blog or website. But over doing of the tactic is not good. For high ranks and to make Google understand that we try to rank a particular keyword. However, Sagar it is an art and you have to learn it. To help you further and readers like you we will soon share a content. Today one post will come up that will show some of the importance of Keywords.

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  2. Jay thanks for sharing the tool, hope my readers find interest in your tool and Clickthorugh's

    ReplyDelete