Search engine optimisation is getting increasingly challenging. Google continues to fine-tune its algorithms, plus there are more and more competitors vying for the top spot. So to beat your competition, you need to out-SEO them.
This will require constant attention to your SEO efforts and quitting toxic practices that may be weighing down your SEO campaigns. If you’re still doing the following SEO practices, now’s the time to stop so that you can achieve top rankings for all the keywords that are relevant for your business.
Fixating Over Rankings
Rankings fluctuate and will always vary. Sometimes you’re on top, sometimes your drop. Plus Google is testing out websites regularly as part of its efforts to gather relevant data to adjust their algorithms. You need to focus on your average rank over a time period instead of your rank yesterday versus today versus tomorrow and so on.
This would keep you from making rash decisions such as disavowing good links just because of its not-so-great performance yesterday.
Optimising for SEO and Forgetting User Experience
So you have a blog post with the perfect amount of words, the right keywords, the ideal keyword density, as well as images and a title that are optimised for your keywords. While this might seem perfect, the content itself is generic and solely optimised for search engines and not users.
Although this tactic might have worked before, Google is now better at identifying irrelevant and generic content. Aside from that, if you do outreach and a website accepts this particular post, chances are that the link from that website is really not valuable.
That said, remember that Google tracks content, traffic, bounce rate, engagement, comments, and length. This means that as long as the content from the SEO company you hired is relevant, unique and created for actual users, websites with high authority will accept them when you do outreach.
Creating More and More Webpages
Before, having more webpages had a direct correlation with search engine rankings. But most practices like this, along with keyword stuffing, are now considered major SEO DON’Ts. So if you’re still obsessing over having lots of webpages, stop.
Focus on better content to keep your rankings high and not how many webpages you have. You’re just wasting your time maintaining webpages that are not in line with your SEO goals.
Having Tons and Tons of Links
Yes, links are very much crucial to any SEO campaign. The thing about links, however, is that it’s not about quantity, but all about the quality. Not convinced? Take a look at the highest-ranking sites, and you’ll notice that they don’t have that many backlinks and the ones they do have are usually all high-quality backlinks.
So don’t fret over having lots and lots of links and focus on acquiring high-quality links.
Overall, the SEO landscape is continuously evolving and has no plans of stopping soon. This applies to search engine algorithms as well. So as you develop new SEO practices, you should also do away with outdated and unhelpful ones like those mentioned here.
