The Do’s and Don'ts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

The digital space, market competition, search trends, and algorithms keep changing. Techniques that worked a few years ago might be amongst the outdated now. It is always a smart idea to stay in the know and follow the rules to get the most out of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Campaigns.

In today's Walibu Wednesday, we will be discussing some dos and don’t from the world of SEO.

There are many ethical SEO methods out there to improve search rankings and drive organic traffic to your website. Here are the three key dos you can start doing today to see a significant difference -

Do - Use Unique & Original Content

Regularly uploading fresh content to your website and social profiles will give search engines more content for search requests, making it re-evaluate your website often for high-quality content.

Search Engines love it when you add more information to your website, it's a very positive signal you are trying to keep up with the newest and latest information on your virtual outlet. However, you have to make sure that the content you add is original, relevant and not plagiarised from some other website. If you aren’t careful, major search engines, including Google, will devalue your page to ensure that unique content creators gain the credit and higher rank that they deserve.

One way of updating regular content to your website is by a company blog. Focus on creating blogs around a keyword topic that is relevant to your industry. Blogs can help you improve your organic traffic as well as provide Google with quality content to offer to search users. You can let a content writing team handle your requirements and create fresh content for your products and services.

Do: User Experience

User Experience (UX) is all about providing the best experience to your site visitors. Good user experience is a very strong signal to search engines to rank you more prominently on search results.

If users come to your website, spend time browsing through multiple internal pages and even come back again to learn more, google will consider it a very positive UX. No one likes to visit or spend time on a website that is not easy to view or navigate, or has design or content errors. Google encourages you to have a mobile-friendly website with great UX to make an overall journey of search relevant and positive.

Do: Local Search

If you are a local business and the majority of your customers are people near your business location, Local SEO is something you can’t ignore.

If you adopt a locally-focused SEO strategy, you will appear higher in local search results when people search for you nearby. By executing various optimization techniques such as building local citations, verifying your GMB listing, and optimizing your website for geo-focused keywords, you can ensure that you will be at the top of this ranking game.

That being said, let’s discuss the don’ts of SEO.

Don’t: Black Hat SEO

In recent times, Google has upgraded its algorithm to eliminate unethical strategies used to cheat search engines. The new algorithm is more focused on quality content, user experience and relevance, this has led to removing spammers out of the search results.

Don’t: Spam

Spammy tactics are for very short term gain and won’t get you anything in long term, instead, it will drop your domain authority making it much more difficult to climb the search ranks in the future.

Google always identifies the bad practices going on to get rank and update its algorithm very often to either disavow the technique or penalize websites that are trying to do it. One example of such practices is “Keyword Stuffing”, here too many keywords are added to the content – just to get ranked for those keywords. If you get caught doing this you’ll be penalized and your rank will drop. Wherever you plan to add keywords to your content, do it in a way it makes sense.

Here are a few other Spam tricks:

Doorway pages – Creating low-quality websites/landing pages solely for link building.
Hidden text – Using the same color font as the background color and add keywords.
Duplicate content – Copying content from another source to your website.
Hidden links – Hyperlinking invisible text for link building.

Following ethical SEO practices as per Google’s standards, and staying up with the latest ranking algorithms is the best way to win the SEO game and get a spot on top search results. Walibu can help you establish and maintain a well-rounded SEO strategy. We can help you top your local search results and attract your ideal ready-to-buy customers.

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