September 22, 2020
When you really want to succeed in your business, average amounts of effort simply won’t do. Going above and beyond is key to getting ahead of your competition while helping you reach your target audience. The thing is, when we’re so driven on doing so well, we tend to overdo a few things—and that can easily backfire on us.
Your search engine optimization strategy is essential to your marketing efforts. Still, over-optimizing it can actually incur penalties on your website. In fact, it might even make you look like an SEO spammer or someone who tries to game the system to rank higher. Instead, here are five tips to make the most out of your SEO without flagging for spam:
Avoid Keyword Stuffing and Irrelevant Keywords
If you have a whole roster of keywords, it can be tempting to fill your entire website with them to get a better chance at ranking higher. The truth is that keyword stuffing alerts Google that you’re trying to cheat the algorithm. It often leads to a poor user experience, since awkward keywords are jammed in as many sentences as possible, which means that your content doesn’t read naturally. Google is adamantly against this, so if they detect that you’ve been overusing keywords on your website, they’ll consider you spam. Putting them in the footer doesn’t work, either.
The journey to ranking first is a long and tough one, but using irrelevant keywords to accomplish that goal will also get you flagged for spam. If the keyword has nothing to do with your website or content, leave it out.
Check Your Anchor Links
Another tip to make the most out of your SEO is to check your anchor links. Also known as anchor text, this is the text that’s used to hyperlink to another website. It’s usually descriptive of the website that is linked. It’s great to put keywords as your anchor link, especially if it’s relevant. Still, it’s even better to keep this at a minimum. Otherwise, it’s pretty spammy behavior, and Google may penalize you for doing this.
A good rule of thumb is to focus on giving your website visitors the best user experience possible—not what you think boosts your SEO.
Publish Quality Content
Marketers love to say that content is king. When it comes to attracting more users to your website and drawing more attention to your company, it’s the truth. Informative, useful, and well-crafted content is a great way to engage with consumers while positioning your company as an authority. Google wants to help users find answers to their questions, so creating high-quality content accordingly is the best way to rank higher.
Google prioritizes complete websites that have plenty of content. However, being too focused on your SEO might encourage you to churn out tons of poor-quality content for the sake of ranking higher. This will reflect poorly on your company, so it’s a great idea to focus on quality over quantity, especially with content.
Pay Attention to Your Backlinks
Link-building is part of the SEO process and helps boost your domain authority. If plenty of websites link back to you, search engines will think that you’re a credible source, right?
This actually isn’t necessarily true. If a known spammer site links back to your website, it reflects badly on your company. Search engines may penalize you for associating with spammer websites, which will sink your search rankings. Again, focus on quality over quantity; ten backlinks from renowned or trustworthy websites is infinitely better than one hundred backlinks from spammer websites.
Keep an Eye on Your Outgoing Links
Similar to the previous point, overdoing your link building can get you in trouble. Although having outgoing links on your website is excellent, it can backfire on you if these are connected to spam websites. Outgoing links are also more challenging to manage, especially since some of these can break over time.
Having broken links on your webpage signals to search engines that you aren’t constantly updating your website. Google, in particular, loves fresh, high-quality content and prioritizes that accordingly. Broken links are a sign that your content is outdated and stale, so keep an eye on your outgoing links.
Conclusion
Going all-out on your SEO efforts is a great way to boost your ranking and drive more traffic to your website. However, if you’re not careful, you might get a little overzealous and accidentally over-optimize your SEO, running the risk of getting penalized. By keeping these five tips in mind, you’ll ensure that your SEO is in top shape, helping you produce great content that helps you rank higher.
Need some help with your SEO? Let us know at Oddball Creative! We are an SEO company in Owensboro, KY that specializes in website design, digital marketing, advertising, and video production. We are a team of creatives that have the skills and imagination to market your business in unique ways. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help!
