5 SEO Strategies That Can Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings

The revolving door of SEO is constantly driving out the old and driving in the new search engine updates that affect millions of website SEO strategies. It’s a full-time job to make sure your SEO strategy is not hurting your website rankings due to search engine updates. If you’re not working with an SEO company, make sure you’re not doing these 5 outdated SEO strategies that many small business owners still do:

Keyword Stuffing Can Hurt SEO Strategy

Keyword stuffing used to be a requirement for many business owners who requested content. Why? Many people used keyword stuffing as a way to rank their page for multiple keywords in search engines. Don’t be greedy. Too much of one thing can have a negative impact on your search engines rankings. Many keyword-stuffed pages started to drop in rankings once Google updated their spam algorithm. When you’re optimizing any content for your website make sure not to embed more than two keywords.

Uploading Only Short-Form Content

Most audiences like their content short and sweet. But search engines love to rank pages with long and in-depth content that many web visitors could use for a complete resource on a topic. Long-form content is defined as content that is 1,500 words or longer. There is a time and place to use short-form content like for the mobile-friendly responsive web design. But there should always be a place for long-form content in your SEO strategy.

Targeting One Keyword

In previous years, targeting a single keyword seemed to be the perfect way to rank higher but people soon found out low-quality sites were ranking higher than high-quality sites. Google has since released the “Panda” update which lowers sites with shallow content that doesn’t go into to depth about content like other quality sites. When targeting a keyword, focus on including a variety of related keywords on the topics at hand. Pick one keyword you want to target, create a topic to write about, and write naturally on the topic using keywords that relate to the target keyword.

Guest Blogging On Low Quality Sites

Spam is the trash of the Internet. Most people either forget to take it out or just simply ignore it. Well Google, has finally decided to take spam blogging, or blogging on low-quality websites to earn backlinks, to the dumpster. Instead of spam blogging, go the extra mile and find a high-quality site to blog on for backlinks. You want as many websites with a good reputation linking back to your site as possible. The better reputation the site has, the better chance you have of your blog being ranked high.

Dismissing The Authority of Social Media

Social media is a lot more powerful than many people realize. Some business owners do not take social media serious because they think of teens and their outrageous posts. Although millions of teens use social media on a daily basis, there are millions more people who use social media for news, current events, and business opportunities. Don’t let your social media marketing strategy fall through the cracks and miss potential business leads. Social media is a powerful way to spread the word about your business and gain favor from Google. Google has said that social signals are not currently a factor in ranking websites but content that is posted on such social channel as Twitter and Google+ tend to have an edge in search rankings. Content posted on any social media channel also can accumulate direct links that boost search rankings.

By just taking these five methods out of your SEO strategy, you can boost your website above many competitors who are not in the know. Click here or call 817-642-9686 to get your SEO strategy updated today!