Don’t Take These SEO Shortcuts
Writing by Brick Marketing in SEO
Anyone who knows anything about SEO knows that it isn’t a quick fix and that it’s not going to work its magic overnight. It takes time to see results, which can sometimes be frustrating. Website owners sometimes want to do all that they can to speed the process up. This is a bad idea for many reasons. SEO isn’t meant to be a fast solution, and viewing it as such will result in a poorly implemented campaign. Below are a few SEO shortcuts to avoid.
No Keyword Research
The first step of an SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research for every page of a website. Obviously this is a time consuming task, especially for a website that has more than fifty pages. Some website owners think that’s it’s OK to skip this step because they “already know what keywords they want to target”. Maybe they do know what they want to target, but are those keywords the best option? You simply don’t know until you conduct research. Keyword research provides website owners with new insights and keyword competition data. It’s important to target a combination of broad and niche (long tail) keywords.
Not Optimizing Every Page
Owners of large websites often think that they don’t need to optimize every page, only the “important” pages. Wait, aren’t all of the pages important? All web pages serve a purpose and if they don’t, consider removing them entirely. The search engines rank individual web pages, not websites as a whole. An interior “Services” page can even rank better than the homepage for specific keywords as long as it has built link trust over time. It’s OK to optimize in phases if it’s a large project, but ultimately every page should receive SEO attention for optimal results.
No Meta Tag Copyrighting
Meta tags aren’t the ranking factors that they once were, but they still have a purpose and it’s SEO best practice to include them. The title tag is the clickable link that is indexed by the search engines. The meta tag description is found beneath the title on a search engine results page and is like a “sales pitch”. It should include keywords and get the searcher to click on your page instead of the other results that they are seeing. The H1 tag is the “header” of the page and the first text that a spider reads on the page. Image tags are useful because a search engine spider can’t “see” the image, so it provides one more text optimization opportunity to include keywords.
Buying Links
Links shouldn’t be bought, they should be earned. The search engines know the difference. Most links that are paid for don’t hold much value anyway. Spend your time and resources on creating quality content to establish relevant inbound links to gain trust with the search engines.
