6 Bad SEO Practices That Will Damage Your Rankings in Search Engines

SEO Practices

TechsPlace | If you talk to SEO specialists and digital marketers, you would most probably get similar answers from all of them. They will all tell you that SEO is hard and if you are not doing it right, you could be wasting a lot of your time because you will not get any positive results (unless you know how to do SEO like an expert).

One thing to note about SEO is that the implementation is easy but being able to master it could take months or even years. It’s really a trial-and-error process. Considering how dynamic SEO is and how it changes over time, you need to really be focused and updated on new trends to keep up with the competition.

You need to learn how to invest enough time into it. Moreover, it is critical that you understand it up to its core so you can avoid making major mistakes that could badly affect your rankings.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of SEO marketers who are not doing it right. Some of them do a step in a very wrong way while some just completely skip it. In this article, we will expose the worst practices you could make in SEO. May this article serve as your guide to not fall into these traps.

#1 –Not Analyzing Which Strategies Convert

First of all, you have to understand that SEO is much more than just the high amount of traffic. You cannot say that your SEO campaign is successful just because you had thousands of visitors this month. SEO is also important for conversions.

You have to learn how to interpret the results of your analytics to see which strategies worked successfully in converting your visitors to customers. When you identify that, you need to start giving it a lot of focus and attention.

#2 – Not Doing Local SEO

This is especially hurtful for those websites and businesses that want to target geo-specific customers. You have to know that search engines are now prioritizing geo-locations when ranking businesses in the search results page.

Let’s have a little example here. Someone who is living in New York is looking for a pet grooming service. Naturally, they want a service that is close by for convenience. They go to Google and do a search with terms like “pet grooming services in New York.” Google then displays the business listings with a physical address that is relevant to the search term used.

If you are not doing local SEO then you could lose your chance of getting found for keywords involving location-specific terms. Here is a complete and easy guide to local SEO.

#3 – Not Using Unique Tags and Meta Descriptions

Many SEO marketers do not pay a lot of attention to optimizing the title tags and the meta descriptions because they think they are not really that important. In most cases, businesses will just have their name on the title tag across all of the pages in their website.

Creating unique and keyword-optimized titles is not only done for SEO purposes. You have to look at the possibility of your pages being shared on social media and if you do not have descriptive titles, no one will click on it.

#4 – Using Generic Texts for Anchor Links

You see it everywhere. People love linking to other pages in their website using words like “this post” or “click here” as anchor texts. While there is a benefit to using call-to-actions to increase your click rate, over-doing it would take away the opportunity for you to use your targeted keywords as anchor texts.

For example, you are writing something about social media management and you want to put a link to your social media services page. Instead of saying, “click here for our services”, you could use your keywords and say something like, “social media management services” and link it.

#5 – Not Varying Anchor Texts

We just mentioned how important anchor texts are. But, we are not saying that you should use the same keywords over and over again for every single anchor text you have on your website or blog post. In fact, doing this would put you at risk of being penalized for keyword stuffing.

Study some best practices with anchor texts so you can efficiently do it without harming your current SEO rankings.

#6 – Choosing Quantity Over Quality

If we were in 2008, quantity would have been really important. But, we are nearing the end of 2018. Today, search engines have algorithms that rank websites according to its relevancy and intent. This simply means that you need to prioritize quality. You need to understand the importance of high-quality content for SEO.

This list is not extensive. There are still a lot of bad practices that many SEO marketers do such as creating poorly-written content that is not worth sharing and not optimizing the website for mobile. For you to avoid these mistakes read a lot and always stay on top of the news regarding SEO and digital marketing.