Every modern company understands the importance of good SEO planning: unfortunately, many are making mistakes that have hurt companies for the last five years. Although some of these items have never been a good look for a business, a couple of them only recently became online company no-nos.
Here’s how to avoid bad or shady SEO tactics and give your company the best chance at success.
Why Avoid Shady SEO Tactics
Avoiding shading SEO tactics is vital to ensure that your company doesn’t tank. Using any of these in recent years can work against your company. Not only will your search results suffer, but customers who are led to your company’s site because of them will trust you less. You can still use trustworthy link-building services, but avoid these scammy behaviors.
Keyword Stuffing
If you’ve ever read an article and it felt like you were reading word salad instead of actual content: chances are they were keyword stuffing.
This can be most easily seen on sites like Amazon, where many sellers will try to fit thirty keywords into their title, so a listing that should say ‘plush blue towel’ will instead say ‘plus towel blue azure gift for men women holidays teal shower bath comfort luxury.’ Of course, these titles don’t make much sense, but they used to help them appear in far more searches.
If a customer lands on your website and the only thing on it is a list of tons of random words and phrases: they’re not going to be interested in looking around and seeing more. Unfortunately, when they quickly click away, this can kill your ranking in most search engines.
Spinning Content
Spinning content is one of the most popular ways that SEO content used to be made. Also known as filing off serial numbers, this would be when companies and websites use other company’s articles as the skeleton for their own.
This means stealing major talking points, the titles of the pieces, and the information from them: but rewording it slightly so it can’t be considered infringement. Although it takes a lot of time and works to put out a lot of content: don’t get caught doing this.
Exact Keyword Matching
This isn’t something that a company can be punished for, but it’s a bad and ineffective tactic! This tactic would require content creators to use a keyword they think would be searched for multiple times within each article. Although this once worked, now it’s more important than the keywords’ information stands up and is valuable to the readers.
Blatant Content Theft
Blatant content theft is similar to spinning content, except it cuts out any work or creativity. This is a terrible idea for companies that want to build a look of trustworthiness and unique views in their audience.
Not only can you eventually be caught, but it will make you look poor in the eyes of customers and the search engines, meaning that your content will drop down on search results. Customers won’t be interested because the company has been deemed shady.