The importance of SEO has grown immensely in recent years as having a digital identity has become an integral part of a company’s survival. Every organization now fights for a prominent place in the search engine results in its respective niche to gain more prominence and generate enhanced leads.
If you also want to grow your business, it’s imperative that you hire the best SEO Agency in New York, You may get suggestions that doing SEO is easy and you can do it on your own. There are tons of tutorials available online that can help you in this regard. However, they do not tell that doing SEO on your own comes with various risks. There are certain practices that are strictly forbidden by Google and employing them can land you in a trouble.
Being a novice, you may not have an idea about them, and adopting one such practice may jeopardize any progress that you have made. To prevent this from happening, we are presenting you with a list of bad SEO tactics you must steer clear of at any cost. No matter how lucrative their result may seem, they can harm your website in the long run.
Read on to know more about them:
1- Paid Links
If you have even a little bit of idea about SEO, you must be aware of link building. It is termed as one of the main pillars of search engine optimization. However, if you’re doing it the wrong way, you can get penalized. And what’s worse? All the hard work that you had done previously will go down the drain.
When you opt for paid links, you’re going against the regulations of the search engine giant. This reason should be enough to explain why you shouldn’t take this route.
2- Cloaking
When you provide different information on your website to cater to every user with the purpose of hiding the actual content, it is considered as cloaking. If discovered, Google will simply mark your website as spam. Resultantly, your website will lose its ranking.
3- Hidden Text
It’s tough for writers to use keywords strategically in the content and maintain the quality at the same time. To tackle this issue, some SEO experts came up with a tricky method of writing hidden text.
As per this trick, the text is written in the same color as the background of the website. Therefore, it’s not readable to the user. However, the search engine could crawl it. This method worked for some time but now, Google considers it as spam.
4- Keyword Stuffing
Again, it was a common practice adopted by many but has now become obsolete due to the sole reason that Google now considered it spam.
Earlier, people used to stuff a lot of keywords in the content. Their mantra was the higher the frequency of the keywords, the better search engine visibility. However, Google now only ranks engaging and quality content. If your content is full of keywords and lacks quality, it wouldn’t rank. Therefore, you need to be smart and creative to add the necessary and relevant keywords while writing quality content.
5- Copied Content
It’s clearly established that content is king. However, not many know about the complete sentence. Content is king under the condition if it is unique, creative, and engaging. A random article stuffed with keywords isn’t what Google will term as king. Furthermore, if it is copied, it’s far from being given any title, well, apart from copied, of course.
To put it very simply, plagiarism is strictly prohibited when creating content. Write unique content that can attract users and make them stay on your website. Also, make sure there’s no duplicate content on your website.
6- Broken Links
It can be really frustrating for a user to land on your page, click on a link, and then see a 404 error. In such a situation, they will, most probably, abandon your website and move to greener pastures (other websites). This also has an impact on SEO.
So, it’s important that you check every link on your website. Even the links you have earned through other sites should be checked for this purpose. If there any broken links, get them fixed or removed.
The Takeaway
In a nutshell, it is safe to say that SEO holds valuable importance for the online presence of your business. Therefore, the right thing to do is to hire the best local SEO company and hand over this responsibility to them. Of course, learning SEO will prove to be useful for you. But, to be able to handle this job, you need to have ample experience and expertise that only professionals have.
