Catastrophic SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid Like The Plague!
Many business owners realise that they need to invest some time and money into making their websites more attractive to visitors and search engines alike.
SEO, short for “search engine optimisation”, is the process that people refer to when they are fine-tuning the code and content on their websites to achieve the goal of receiving high volumes of traffic.
Although there are many SEO specialists on hand to help organisations get their websites to rank higher in search engines and make sense to human visitors, many website owners are taking it upon themselves to perform their own SEO strategies.
Whilst that can be a good way of saving money and getting to grips with how your website fits in with search engine optimisation strategies, it can also be the bane of many a search engine marketer’s life if they don’t know what they are doing!
Are you planning to set up an SEO strategy on your website? If so, make sure you avoid these common problems!
Buying fake fans and followers
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past ten years or so, social media is an effective way to engage with your target audience and ultimately drive traffic to your website.
New social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter will undoubtedly start with zero fans or followers. Whilst people might cheat and “buy” fake fans and followers to kick things off, there are some downsides to this approach.
Firstly, there is the quality of the fans and followers that you buy. Although they are often advertised as “real” accounts, nine times out of ten they are just fake accounts set up by someone on the other side of the world to you.
Secondly, the rate at which these suspicious accounts get added can often cause accounts to be suspended if they are violating any terms of use.
Finally, apart from appearing to show how popular you are, any marketing campaigns on your social media accounts will be fruitless because you aren’t targeting any real human beings.
Stuffing your web pages with keywords
Google and the other major search engines on the World Wide Web will effectively blacklist any website that uses spam techniques for the purposes of raising their profile on any search engine results pages.
My friend Stuart, an SEO professional that works for a digital agency in Perth, has said to me that one of the classic mistakes marketers often make is stuffing their web pages full of keywords, or “cloaking” them.
This “black hat” method of SEO involves writing keywords at the bottom of a web page and changing the font colour to be the same as the page’s background colour. That approach might have worked in 1999, but it won’t work in 2014.
Not using a responsive design
The main way of making your website accessible to people using all manner of Web-connected devices (desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets) is to use what’s known as a responsive design.
In a nutshell, a responsive website will automatically adapt to the type of device and screen size the visitor is using. If the content on your website looks tiny on a mobile device, it can wreck your chances of running a successful SEO campaign.
