SEO is one of the most complex and misunderstood marketing disciplines. It combines a large number of tools and best practices that evolve consistently, all adjusting to the regular Google updates that are released.
Bad habits can be established by not adapting to latest best practice, or by taking short cuts. They can impact your rankings or even get your site penalised. Here is a list of poor SEO habits and methods that you should ignore in 2022.
The days of keyword stuffing and ghosting/phantom text are long gone, those Black-hat techniques now end up penalising your website as opposed to being a positive ranking factor in years gone by. High quality, bespoke content that matches the intent of the user will help you rank higher. For example, if you’re attempting to rank for “teeth whitening treatment” then develop the copy around that term. Think about what information a user would look for and be interested in reading. It could be the benefits, background information on the treatment or an FAQ section.
Don’t be tempted to copy and paste content from other pages on the web, Google will pick up on this, and your website won’t rank as well as it could.
It can be a bit overwhelming to know that there are over 200 ranking factors Google scores your website against. Where do you start? Thankfully, due to trial and error and lot of historic work and research, it is known that there few more heavily weighted factors that you can certainly be focusing on. On-page optimisation is an important factor and really is a quick win. It would be a mistake not to ensure the on-page basics are covered such as keywords in meta-title/description, good use of h1 & h2 tags, naturally distributed key-phrases, and supportive use of images (include alt tags!).
Admittedly, the warnings you receive when running a website can get a bit much, especially as the site gets larger. One tool to keep an eye on is Google Search Console, despite having it’s fair share of “minor” alerts, it will indicate a number of major issues that can be detrimental to the website.
Google Search Console provides usability and indexing issues, two huge factors that effect ranking. If the usability is poor, it can be fixed over a period of time but users will still be able to find the website. On the other hand, if the site is not being indexed for any reason it means your potential customers cannot find you in the search results. No results equals no organic traffic.
This can seem like a tedious task having to compress every single image you upload to your website. You may be thinking that the extra few megabytes won’t hurt, right? Wrong… slow websites are the main cause of high bounce rate, and website speed is now an important ranking factor! Use a tool such as TinyPNG to optimise your images before uploading to your website. WordPress also has a plugin call Litespeed, which can also optimise for performance.
Google update their search engine algorithm…a lot. With these updates, come game changing methods and best practice. Being in the dark can seriously effect your website’s performance. What may have worked a few months ago, could now be harming your website! Stay up to date by reading the latest posts on seroundtable.com or Moz.com.