With how important SEO is rapidly becoming for organizations looking to their business on the web, it is not a surprise that businesses often get absolutely downright dumb advice for their SEO practices. The rapid growth in demand for SEO experts has completely outpaced SEO and digital marketing experts’ supply. While more and more people are learning these skills every day, there is still a steady gap in the market.
Search Engine Optimization is a process that targets and tries to increase the amount of organic traffic visiting your website via search engines. SEO is an important tactic in a larger digital marketing picture. It not only increases the traffic to your website or blog, but the traffic is more primed towards your content, services, or products as well. This is why SEO is so important. Not only is it cost-effective when compared to just using SEM, but it also more reliable. By doing the right things, you can see the benefits of SEO in your website traffic.
But doing the right thing is hard when all you are receiving is bad advice. From being told that SEO can show its results within a week to being to set up multiple websites, there is no lack of bad advice out on the internet. Often sprouted by untrustworthy publications and inexperienced agencies, not only are statements like these creating an unrealistic expectation in the minds of businesses, but they are also setting up a vicious circle of bad advice that new businesses and online marketers will believe.
Some of these dumb suggestions aren’t that dumb on paper either. But any experienced agency, like Digital Assets Factory Agency, can tell you that they never have the intended result you are looking for in practice.
In order to help people and businesses avoid falling into the pit trap of bad advice and terrible SEO practices, we have compiled a list of some of the worst SEO advice that you may hear out there. If you ever hear any of these suggestions, then it’s time for you and your business to choose a different agency or expert.
1.Stuffing Keywords in the Anchor Text
What’s the advice?
Anchor text is the text that you click on in order to use a hyperlink. By adding keywords to the anchor text, you are trying to optimize it in hopes that the link starts ranking higher.
So, for example, if you were adding a hyperlink to “example.com/digital-marketing-agency,” then you’d use the anchor text “Digital Marketing Agency” or even something like “Digital Marketers” (any other phrase that you were trying to optimize as well).
This advice at first doesn’t seem that terrible. In fact, many SEO professionals would not consider this advice as terrible either. That’s often because they have not kept up with the changing developments or just aren’t aware of these specific mechanics changing.
Why this does not work?
To perhaps give some leeway to those who suggest doing this, optimizing your anchor text did use to work. The operative word there being “did.” After the Penguin algorithm update, optimizing your anchor text can lead your website to be considered spam by Google. Google and other search engines now heavily penalize webpages that are “over-optimized,” and optimized anchor texts are key signs.
What to do instead?
You should still be using anchor texts, but they shouldn’t need to be optimized. Stick with natural words that convey what the link might lead to, and it will provide for a better user experience. If you really want to include your keyword in the anchor text, then try to use partial matches, phrases, brand names, and LSI keywords instead.
2.Just Focusing on Content
What’s the advice?
This one might be a bit controversial. With today’s search engine algorithms, you often hear this advice from experts and professionals, “Leave it on the content.” Leaving it on the content basically showcases a school of thought where a website or blog can increase its SERP ranking just by releasing great content.
For example, if your business was offering services and products related to personal finance for young professionals, you would have content like multiple blog articles on personal finance topics.
By adding good quality content, you’ll be able to quickly rise in search rankings as more people will start visiting your website looking for information you’re providing.
Why doesn’t it work?
Many experts and professionals fail to explain, or perhaps understand themselves, that content is not the sole component of a content marketing strategy. They’re not wrong in saying that you need good quality content delivered regularly in order to build subject matter authority and climb the search rankings. Where they are wrong is the fact the content is worthless without the rest of the SEO mechanism.
Without proper on-page optimization, website architecture, outreach, and community strategies, and even keyword selection, your great content will die a lousy, forgettable death in the annals of your never visited website.
What to do instead?
Good content forms the backbone of any good digital marketing effort. But in order to fully leverage that content, more work needs to be put in. Content is a part of the greater strategy; it is not the strategy on its own.
By utilizing proper on-page optimization, choosing the right keywords, having a lightweight and fast website architecture, having a way for your content to reach the community, and strategies for outreach, your content will be able to show its worth and start putting in the results for your website.
3.Using Just One Technique
What’s the advice?
There are plenty of different techniques that can be adopted for improving your website’s SEO results. From focusing heavily on on-page SEO to having in-depth research on keywords or relying upon email marketing to do the job. Often, SEO experts and professionals will tell you that instead of focusing on every single technique and strategy out there, that your business will be better served by only focusing all its resources and efforts on one very hyper-focused strategy and those techniques that directly support it.
So, for example, you are told that a content marketing strategy works the best for your website. You will then hyper-focus your attention and resources on content marketing. You won’t waste time using all of the content marketing techniques (methods in this case) available to you but are only focusing on blog writing.
Why doesn’t it work?
If you were to describe SEO practices and the world of technology in general, then you would be able to succinctly describe it in one single word; changing. SEO practices are constantly changing. So is the world of technology around us. What works in SEO today may no longer be a good strategy tomorrow. We can see many examples of this happening already. We already talked about how “over-optimizing” used to work but now is penalized instead.
By hyper-focusing your SEO strategy, you are putting your website at risk of being very badly affected if things ever change. Using the same example, if Google’s next algorithm update suddenly started putting less weight behind good quality blogs, or even if people just stopped liking reading blogs in general, then your website will suddenly drop down in SERP rankings almost overnight.
It’s not like we haven’t seen it happen in real life either. Many experts know and remember websites that are absolutely crushed by the sudden loss of web traffic due to changes in the search engine algorithm. For businesses that rely on web traffic to survive, it is a slow but agonizing death.
What to do instead?
Instead of trying to just focus on one aspect of SEO, you should take a more generalistic approach. By utilizing multiple techniques and strategies, not only are you reducing the risk of any change suddenly wrecking your SEO rankings, but you are also leveraging more tools to get better results. This is not to say that you should spread your efforts thin.
Your SEO strategy should still be focused, but it should not be limited. By expanding the strategies and tools you use, you will be able to achieve better results faster but with more long-term stability as well.
Conclusion
SEO can be very confusing for businesses and individuals. That’s why it is the responsibility of experts and professionals to give the best advice possible. But often, the best advice from the wrong person still means that it is dumb advice. By choosing the right people for your SEO needs, you will not hear terrible advice like the ones listed above.
There are many more terrible suggestions that many experts and professionals still continue to give. Even though evidence shows that their advice doesn’t work, these professionals knowingly exploit the poor understanding of SEO practices that most businesses have. Sometimes they just don’t know any better. That’s why we have provided you with this small list of terrible advice, for being forewarned is being forearmed.