Great Tips for Actionable SEO- Part 1
There are many businesses today that still have a difficult understanding seeing the real value of SEO. Many of the information and misinformation on the web today about SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, and it is increasing the difficulty of people’s decisions.
Having an effective SEO strategy can take upto 6 months to yield and positive results for any company depending on the industry and tactics may not make a lot of sense to those non-SEOers. However, implementing this strategy can make a huge improvement to the company’s online exposure and profits.
There are still businesses that are naturally nervous about venturing in to something they are not familiar with but if you think about it, nearly any decision you make for a business is going to have some risks with it.
So what SEO risks are worth it and which should be avoided?
What Risks Should You Take
Getting & Giving High Quality Backlinks
Would you want your company to feature a link to another company’s website and risk the visitor leaving your page?
Having backlinks are a well established part of any SEO strategy and many businesses today want to get as many as they can. They help towards increasing your rankings in the SERPs and building authority.
But, don’t think it is all about having the most links, you need to give something back to.
In hindsight, you may risk losing a few website visitors by providing a link to another high quality site but you are also showing Google that you’re using and referencing reliable sites who already have an established authority.
Just keep in mind that using low-quality, malicious and spammy sites is not the way to go as you may get penalized by getting too many links from poor quality websites
Enhance The URL Structure of Your Site
When it come to your homepage, your URL should be short in length with preferably just a company name, such as, www.yourcompany.com. Simple, short and easily remembered.
The subsequent pages should have keywords that are targeted to that individual page and should be more specific about the content of the webpage.
But, you do not want to get let the URL get too messy. If they are too long and descriptive the search engines will cut the url off with an {…}.
So make sure you URLs are structure to be short, concise and relevant.
The risk, here, is that any kind of change like this can impact your rankings. As you alter old URLs and 301 redirect traffic to the new ones, you may see some dips in traffic and rankings.
However, if you do it right, you can end up with a streamlined structure that appeals to both search engines and internet users.
Purchase Expired or Available Domains
There are many website owners that still don’t renew their domains and this makes others able to buy and use them. When purchasing a domain with a history and redirecting them to your website can potentially be a quicker way to increased the number of valuable backlinks to your site which will add some extra link juice.
There can be some risk to this technique and you should only do this when you know what you are doing.
You must make sure that the domain is related to your business and that it is professional and legitimate because it will still receive rankings and traffic. There is nothing that is more frustrating than arriving at a website and there is nothing that is related to your original searches.
This tactic, however, is inexpensive and has the potential to drive serious traffic to your site if you follow the best practices.
SEO Risks to Avoid
Poor Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are easy and simple to make in batches which target specific keywords and groups. SEOer will tend to avoid doorway pages as a rule of thumb as Google doesn’t really like them and will penalise the websites that use them.
Having Google giving an opinion of these pages should be a reason to back off and avoid this particular risk.
The only time Google will let doorway pages slide is if they offer unique, clear and valuable content and information to the site visitor.
Using Exact Match Keywords in Anchor Text
It may seem like the right thing to do to have your targeted keywords as the anchor text for a link to your website.
This was popular for many SEO managers in the past but unfortunately this practice was abused by the ‘black hat’ brigade who used an excessive amount of exact match keyword anchor texts to link their websites.
From this point, Google has cracked down on this and will punish those websites that overdo this.
Updating Too Many Minor SEO Changes On A Site
Now and then, it can be a good idea to update some of the content on your website and in fact, Google favors fresh updated content.
But, constantly changing the content and the look of your website here and there, for SEO purposes, will not go unnoticed by visitors or Google.
Making too many changes to your website and doing it far to often can will raise red flags for Google and will mark your website down as suspicious and will likely penalize your site.
Over time your site visitors will also notice the changes (especially since most of the changes were likely done for search engines instead of them). If this happens, they may find your site harder to navigate and find value. Some visitors may even start to think your site is suspicious.
To Conclude
SEO is an essential tool for any business to succeed and it is very rewarding too. There are some risk to using certain SEO tactics, some of those are worth taking as they will produce favourable results for your business. However, there are other risks too which can harm your business and its reputation online.
As risky as SEO is, the only thing riskier is for a company not to do any SEO at all.
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