5 SEO Tactics to Steer Clear of

SEO is a lot like mountain climbing; keeping to the trodden trails to the summit for success, or risk completely falling off the mountain face if you stray too far away from the proven path. These potentially fatal optimisation detours can be due to old, now irrelevant or deemed black hat SEO tactics, old habits or unsubstantiated hearsay, which if used can destroy your own SEO campaigns.

So how do we avoid falling off the cliff of Google search results and continue with our steady ascent to the summit? We look at some of the easy errors which can be easily avoided to help improve your relations with Google as well as your SEO campaigns.

Over linking

There is such a thing as over SEOing a site. If you over do it then alarm bells can begin to ring within Google that something fishy or spammy is going on. One indication of this is linking to the same content multiple times within an article’s main body. Apart from reducing the quality of your own links search engines will start to see it as just a way of cramming your pages with keyword filled anchor text.

Link Consistency

When linking to a particular page throughout your site make sure that the URL remains the same for each link. While there may be no difference between your index.html and normal home page you will be spilling serious link juice if you are splitting your links between the two.

Another potential problem with this is due to duplicate content, so make sure your site is lean with no excess fatty content or duplicate pages to effect your linking.

Share some PR Love

It’s great to get some high quality and relevant outbound links into your pages. There’s nothing better than extra context to your content, however make sure that you don’t NoFollow all of your links.

By NoFollowing your links you are effectively stopping whoever you are linking to from receiving any link juice. If you want to get into the position where you are working with other sites, potentially guest blogging for them, they are less likely to be interested in a partnership if they aren’t getting anything out of it due to your NoFollow links.

Keeping a Tidy Home

The vast majority of sites will find that the best ranking page on their site is their home page as it has the most external links pointed to it. This means that extra care should be take to make sure that this page is correctly optimised, linking to fresh content which is demand, while being sure to direct traffic to where is most needed.

Don’t be Dense

There was a time when keyword density was all of the range. This led to a lot of repetition, making content more focused on search bots than the human readers themselves. This is why it has dropped out of favour with the bots and SEO’s. So don’t stuff in keywords for the sake of it, concentrate on creating high quality content which will be enjoyed an shared by your target audience.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

About Dean Saliba

Dean Saliba is a freelance writer, professional blogger, media enthusiast, keen long-distance runner, and huge professional wrestling fan, who covers a wide range of subjects and niches including: making money online, traffic generating, pro wrestling, blog reviews, football, how-to guides, music, internet marketing, running, and more.

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