5 Bad SEO Strategies You Need to Avoid at All Costs

Bad SEO marketing will cost you far more than good SEO ever will.

The temptation of a quick fix to get a boost in the rankings is always there, but it is one that you need to resist. Poor SEO optimization will do more damage to your site’s overall rankings and your reputation.

But what do we mean by bad SEO strategies, and what things could you be doing to damage your site’s reputation without realizing it?

Read on to discover the ways your current SEO strategy may be doing more harm than good.

1. Spamming Keywords

Ensuring you have the right keywords in your articles is a vital part of any SEO content strategy. Using SEO keywords helps people find your content when using the Search Engines.

However, this quickly becomes a bad SEO strategy if you overstuff keywords into your text. They should occur naturally in your articles without feeling too spammy. Don’t be tempted to cram them in, as the Search Engines will penalize your pages if you do.

2. Poor Quality Backlinks

As well as a strong keyword strategy and good backlink strategy is an essential component of good SEO. You need to create a strong backlink profile with highly trustworthy sites by creating content people want to share.

Similarly, if you do not build a good backlink profile and instead are tempted to buy backlinks for dubious sources, this will negatively impact your SEO. Using link farms to ‘spamdex‘ your site is a Black Hat SEO tactic that will result in penalties from the Search Engines.

3. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content occurs in two ways on a website – using other websites’ content, and duplicating your own content.

Plagiarism is frowned upon by content creators and Search Engines alike. Nobody likes people who steal others’ content and claim it as their own. This goes for those who spin others’ content and change it very slightly to match their needs.

You also need to be careful not to plagiarize yourself by having duplicate versions of content on your site or a sister site. All content needs to be individual and fresh to get a thumbs up from the Search Engines and improve your rankings.

4. No Internal Links

As part of your SEO content marketing strategy, you will be building relationships with other sites to boost your backlink profile. However, don’t forget to boost your own content internally too.

Internal linking and creating solid references in your own site is just as important as building external links. Internal links will allow your visitors to navigate your site more easily and encourage them to stay longer.

Build links to pages that are in the same topic cluster, possibly from one central pillar article. This will strengthen the references between the links and be beneficial to your SEO content strategy.

5. Technical Errors

As you create more content and make changes to your website, technical errors will begin to accrue in the background. These can be broken links, missing meta descriptions or alt tags, or other problems with the page.

Search Engines like Google will penalize pages with technical errors because they take away from the user experience. Something that Google holds in extremely high regard.

Ensure you fix any technical errors regularly to avoid any negative penalities to your SEO.

Use White Hat SEO Strategies

It may be tempting to take some shortcuts with your SEO and possibly try and find an easier way to build your brand, but it is never worth it in the long run. Use only good SEO strategies that might take a little while to implement but will cost you much less heartache down the line.

If you are looking for a boost to your SEO marketing or build a new search engine-friendly website, check out our SEO packages.