Getting to grips with SEO takes most website owners a little while. There are very few people who are able to instinctively do SEO the right way. It is only natural to turn to the internet for expert SEO advice, but this can sometimes be like opening Pandora’s Box. While there is lots of great advice out there, there is also a lot of bad advice that you need to avoid.
Use As Many Keywords As Possible
There was a time long ago when simply adding as many keywords as possible to your articles would significantly boost your SEO. However, this hasn’t been the case for almost two decades now and Google algorithms are incredibly sophisticated today. It takes a lot more than indiscriminate keyword stuffing to fool Google. If you want your content to be visible in search results, then you need to use keywords, but they need to be used strategically.
Adding more and more keywords, or repeating the same keywords over and over again, do nothing to make your content more visible. Worse than that, keyword stuffing can actually lead to Google penalizing you and reducing your SEO score. Overusing keywords is also the kind of behavior that is likely to get your website marked as potential spam.
Anyone who is advising you to just use as many keywords as possible is either hopelessly out of the loop and operating on outdated information or they are just not very competent when it comes to SEO. In fact, Google has gone to great lengths in its last several algorithm update cycles to reduce the role of keywords in determining SEO. We’re not saying that you should abandon keywords altogether, not just yet. However, it’s important to know which direction the wind is blowing in and to appreciate that the role of the keyword is changing.
Don’t Bother With Social Media
It’s cool to hate on social media these days. But it’s fun as well. There’s certainly no shortage of ammunition if you want to take down the entire concept of social media. However, love it or loath it, it would be mad to deny the power and importance that social media has in matters of marketing. Every marketing campaign in the modern world should have a social media component. Not only do social media platforms enable marketers to get their marketing in front of millions of people, but they’re off also a vital component of a holistic SEO strategy.
As we said earlier, Google is slowly moving away from its previous keyword-driven approach to SEO. Under the new paradigm, social media will have an even more prominent role to play in helping your SEO along. If you use them the right way, social media platforms can be a very fruitful source of traffic to your main website. However, if you are only using your social media profiles to backlink to content that your publishing on your website then Google will view this as equivalent to spamming your link across a number of websites. Worse still, some social media platforms have banned users in the past because they have mistaken them for black hat SEO spam accounts.
You Only Need A Basic Internet Connection To Start A Website
It is technically true that in order to start your own blog or website, you don’t need access to a very good internet connection, anything will do. However, if you are serious about your website or blog and you want to turn it into a commercial venture, then you are absolutely going to have to invest in a decent internet connection.
An unreliable internet connection can also cause you a number of issues. When you first launch your website, maintaining a consistent upload schedule will help you to build your SEO score and audience as quickly as possible. But, if your internet connection is liable to fizzle out unexpectedly, then your computer might not have access to the internet at the crucial moment in time.
Just as having a reliable internet connection at home is essential for any blogger or website owner, you also need to ensure that the server hosting your blog has a decent connection. If the server that hosts your website is slow and sluggish then that is exactly what your users will experience. You don’t need to go overboard when you first launch your website it isn’t going to need the full resources of a high-end hosting package. But you also want to aim higher than a simple hobbyist level package.
Google takes the speed at which your website serves up pages into account when determining your SEO score.
Repost Successful Content Instead Of Writing New Stuff
Evergreen content is content that is always of interest to an audience. Evergreen content is different from seasonal or topical content that is very much tied to a particular point in time. The right piece of evergreen content on a website can generate a steady flow of traffic over a period of many years. Many pieces of evergreen content also experience periodic spikes in their popularity, drawing in large numbers of users when the article does the rounds on social media.
But there are a lot of misunderstandings about evergreen content. Evergreen content is not content that you keep re-uploading, again and again, hoping to recapture past successes. Evergreen content should be able to stand on its own two feet organically. You can use your social media channels to occasionally remind people about your best pieces of evergreen content. However, if the content is not drawing in readers year-round on its own, then it is not truly evergreen content.
Some people will advise you to try and create artificial evergreen content by simply reposting the same articles again and again. In the long run, this is only going to irritate your audience, and it isn’t going to win you any new readers.
There is a lot of bad SEO advice out there. At best it is ineffective, but at its worst, it can actively damage your SEO efforts. Don’t be afraid to disregard bad advice whenever you encounter it.