Warning: Avoid these Top SEO Blunders

Warning: Avoid these Top SEO Blunders

Search engine optimization is a huge opportunity to generate website traffic and sales for almost any business. But it is seen as a risky marketing area by many business owners. The SEO industry seems to be in a constant state of flux, and there are plenty of stories of wasted money and misguided consultants.

Without knowing what tactics to put in place to see success and generate ROI, many business owners avoid SEO entirely or make costly mistakes. That means missed opportunities and lost business.

Make sure your SEO investment goes where it should! These top blunders are some of the most costly mistakes marketing departments and businesses owners make when it comes to SEO. And they are still surprisingly common. Avoid them and you will already be way ahead of your competition.

Flimsy Outsourcing

For most businesses, outsourcing is the way to go when it comes to SEO. Interns lack the experience they need without experienced leadership, and hiring a senior SEO marketer gets expensive quickly.

Outsourcing can work great when you do it right. But there are some pretty big mistakes that can be made. Be sure that you are asking your agency the right questions, even if they come highly recommended.

You need to know what the firm will do for you and and your business on a tactical level. If you are involved with an SEO agency that refuses to tell you what tactics they are using for your campaign, be very concerned. The reason they may not be sharing this important information is because they are afraid you will disagree with their tactics or find them to be risky and potentially harmful for your company.

A reliable SEO firm will not only tell you what they will accomplish for you and the ROI you can expect, but they will also explain how it is done. You don’t have to become an expert to understand it, but it is important to work with an agency that is transparent and willing to show you how they accomplish goals. You should have a project plan from your SEO agency and understand roughly what it means.

Good SEO agencies also care a lot about the big picture. They don’t operate in a vaccuum, doing all their SEO work in a silo. SEO should be integrated with many different pieces of your business including marketing, PR, and branding. Sales, content marketing and your online social media presence all come into play. If your agency is not seeking to coordinate with these other areas, they are missing a lot of opportunities.

Questionable Link Building

Link building in and of itself is a huge part of search engine optimization. According to some studies, link building factors account for up to 56% of search engine ranking algorithms. A good SEO campaign is not complete without some facet of link building. However, there is a lot to link building that has no impact on rankings or can actually harming your SEO efforts.

One of these harmful tactics is using exact match anchor text as you build links. Exact match link building happens when you want to rank on Google for a term like “website design,” so you build links to your site that says exactly “website design.” This used to work, but I have to be honest - it does not work anymore! Exact match anchor links can actually harm your rankings today and will seriously harm your rankings in the future. There is a lot to be said about exact match link building, but let’s keep this simple: Avoid it!

There are other forms of link building that have been harmful for a long time and are a bit more obvious: Link farms (pages with hundreds of unrelated links), link exchanges (“link to me and I’ll link to you”), generic link directories, spamming for links and links in computer generated content. Avoid it all!

This is another great reason to know what your SEO agency is doing for you. Many agencies still use these “black hat” link building strategies without even telling their customers. Even JC Penney and Overstock.com were penalized (and lost millions) because of the questionable link building their agencies did on their behalf!

Search engines are looking for natural links. Matt Cutts, Google’s spam chief, says that “We try to reflect the real-world importance of things as we see that reflected in the web.” They are looking for websites that are authentically popular with real people. To that end, you should try to get people to talk about (and link to) the great content that you are publishing.

Focus on the basics to earn natural links. Update your blog regularly with in-depth resources, industry studies, guides and how-to’s -- content that people link to. Find real people that want to read and share this type of content in your industry. Get to know them, find a way to help them out, and then (politely) ask for a link.

Bonus link building tip: You probably already have friends, colleagues, clients or vendors that would be happy to link to you, if you only asked.

Over Optimization

Another tactic that used to be a standard SEO strategy is keyword stuffing. Let’s say that you want to rank for “website design” again. The old theory said that the more you could stuff the words “website design” on to your page, the better it would rank. Today, search engines easily catch this “over optimization.” It’s not hard for them to see when a keyword is unnaturally overused on your website.

Over optimization applies to any attempt to “force” your website to rank better by manipulating one or multiple SEO tactics. For effective and future-proof SEO campaigns, it is important to balance the needs of optimizing your website for search engines and making your site appealing to real people.

Take keyword stuffing for example. Search engines need to see keywords on your website to know what your website is about. Search engines also want to see variations and synonyms of that keyword. But people also need to read that content and be convinced that you are an expert in your field. The solution is actually stupid-simple. Write good content on or about your target keywords. If you hire writers, look for experienced authors in your field and ask for great content. Including specific keywords should be the afterthought, not the main focus. Awesome content will go much further than keyword-stuffed content.

What is the big lesson to learn from all this? You can’t just throw money at SEO and expect it to work. And you can’t “trick” search engines anymore, either!

Smart SEO investments can still generate massive returns. A huge, growing portion of online traffic is being scooped up by well optimized websites. Make sure your site is earning the traffic it deserves!

Nate Dame is founder and chief strategist at SEOperks, a boutique search engine optimization agency. He has led efforts on a wide variety of SEO campaigns including Sketchers USA and Grasshopper.com. He is also an author, speaker, trainer and consultant, as well as an avid family man and active member of multiple non-profits. When not crafting campaigns, he enjoys relaxing with his wife and two-year-old son at their home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.