SEO is one of the most important aspects that any business should consider in order to grow. Search engine optimization helps your business by making it known to more people and attracting bigger numbers of potential customers. That is why it’s important to learn the Dos and Don’ts of SEO (including the worst SEO practices), and then keep those in mind as you start becoming more experienced at optimizing your site’s content.
Whether you are a SEO newbie or already have some experience in digital marketing, it’s always helpful to return to the basics from time to time. That’s why, we’ll now tell you about 5 of the worst SEO practices to avoid at all costs.
Worst SEO practice 1: Picking the wrong keywords (short-tailed vs long-tailed)
One of the worst SEO practices that less experienced people tend to make is going after the wrong keywords. If you are a business that’s just starting out, you need to acknowledge that your competitors are way ahead of you. This means that you stand little to no chance to rank for common, short-tailed keywords in your field of business.
For example, if you are selling bicycles, “buy bicycle” would be a terrible keyword to try to rank for. There will already be millions of pages competing for that same keyword. That is why you must try with a longer-tailed keyword. For instance, add a specific area to the keyword and/or a specific type of bike. Don’t make the keyword too long, but also remember that the more specific you make it, the smaller the competition you’ll face.
You may also like: How to create effective keywords for your content writing?
Worst SEO practice 2: Forgetting about your site’s speed
Google’s page ranking standards and algorithms are constantly shifting and changing, but page experience seems to be a factor of ever-increasing importance. A major part of this factor is the speed of a page. In other words, the faster a page loads and responds to input, the higher it will rank.
Since this is a relatively new factor, many business owners disregard its importance, which is another one of the bad SEO practices. Even if everything else on your pages is top quality, this won’t be enough if the page is slow.
The good news is there are quick and easy ways to optimize your pages for speed and responsiveness. One major mistake lots of people make is uploading large images (in terms of file size) on their webpages. It’s good to have HD images on your site, but past a certain quality threshold, you’ll start getting diminishing returns. Besides, choosing a proper file format can let you have good-looking, HD images without them being over half a megabyte.
Another thing that can slow down your pages (if using WordPress) is if you have a lot of plugins activated on them. Generally, try to keep active only the ones you truly need, and get rid of the rest.
Something that can be of great help when optimizing your site’s speed is Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool or Pingdom Website Speed Test. They will tell you which aspects of your site can be improved to get better speeds.
Worst SEO practice 3: Disregarding the meta description
Another of the worst SEO practices is to forget to optimize your meta description. The meta description of your pages is the small text that appears under their title on a search results page.
While this description doesn’t play a role in a webpage’s ranking, it is a major factor in determining how many people will actually click on said page. Therefore, you need to carefully decide what the meta description will be. Your goal here is to make it as inviting as and as compelling as possible and thus get more users to come to your site.
Worst SEO practice 4: Not keeping users on your site
It’s not enough to get the user to visit your site, but you also need to keep them there. This will help you get more leads and convert those leads into customers. One of the worst SEO practices is to ignore the importance of keeping visitors on your site.
A good method to help you here is to implement call-to-action prompts. Those could be purchase buttons, newsletter sign-up forms, discount offers, etc. Another useful thing to do is add internal links to your pages that redirect to useful and related resources. This will also help with your site’s internal linking structure and inform Google that the interlinked pages are related.
Worst SEO practice 5: Forgetting about mobile
The fifth worst SEO practice we want to tell you about is not optimizing for mobile. Since 2018, Google has shifted towards prioritizing the mobile version of a site when ranking it.
This means that you must make sure to provide your site with a very well-optimized mobile version. Failing to do so will all but guarantee that your site won’t rank as high as it could, regardless of how well you’ve optimized its other elements.
Final notes
SEO is not always easy and even the best in the field can end up making newbie mistakes. The trick is to keep honing your skills and updating your knowledge as this is the only way to stay ahead of the curve and to keep growing your business.
In the meantime, if you decide to use some professional help for your SEO strategy, feel free to contact us and learn more about our digital marketing services. You can find more info at Sylably.com or on our official Facebook page. Additonally, get a free quote using this form.
You may also like: What is actually SEO and is it beneficial for my business?
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