You must stay up-to-date with current tactics to get the best out of search engine optimization [SEO]. There is no doubt that bad SEO can do more harm to your website than good. Bad SEO is any practice that could hurt your rankings, go against Google’s guidelines, or provide a poor user experience. These are often outdated SEO practices.
In this article, we’ll explore outdated SEO tactics that you should avoid if you want your website to rank higher on the search engine results page [SERPS] and provide your visitors with an excellent user experience. Let’s delve into them.
- Producing low-quality content
Content is king when it comes to search engine optimization. So, that means that low-quality content translates to bad SEO. Many website owners usually produce low-quality content to save money and time. But in this case, the opposite will happen. It will not only lead to poor search rankings and low conversions but it will also taint your brand’s reputation.
Content is typically considered low-quality if it is not original, does not answer the users’ search query, has numerous grammatical errors, or has poor readability. As a website owner, producing high-quality and informative content is one of the most effective ways to boost your search rankings. Such content will be easily shared, leading many people to the website and increasing web traffic. You can work with an SEO Friesland agency to create high-quality, original content.
- Keyword stuffing
Another bad SEO tactic that can affect your search ranking is keyword stuffing. This involves unnaturally loading your content with keywords. While it is right to use keywords throughout your content to show up higher in the search engines, using too many keywords within your content can be very detrimental. It will hurt your readers’ experience and alert search engines that you’re trying to manipulate their algorithms, resulting in a manual action from Google.
This trick used to work in the past, but not anymore, as the algorithm has evolved to detect stuffing. The best way to avoid this is to use keywords naturally throughout your content.
- Having duplicate content
Having original content is super beneficial for your website because search engines such as Google tend to reward uniqueness and relevance. Duplicate content is considered unoriginal as it refers to pages created with similar content.
Having duplicate content on your WordPress Friesland website can adversely affect your website searches, such as lower page rankings and indexing issues because search engines already have the same content in their index, so they have no reason to index your web page since it doesn’t offer anything new. So, as a website owner, you must strive to produce original content if you want your website to rank higher.
- Ignoring mobile SEO
The popularity of mobile search is increasing yearly. Mobile devices account for more than half of all searches. Furthermore, some websites receive even more visits from mobile devices than others. As a result, concentrating only on desktop optimization techniques is a poor SEO strategy. It could harm your SERP ranks and offer a poor mobile user experience, potentially driving away potential customers.
Suppose you want to strengthen your optimization strategy. In that case, you can implement mobile SEO best practices, such as avoiding popups on mobile devices, ensuring that the “touchable” elements are working correctly, and providing the elements of your website are not too wide for the viewpoint, thus causing horizontal scrolling.
