Anyone who knows anything
about SEO must know that it isn’t a quick fix & that it’s not going to work
overnight. It takes time to see results, which can sometimes be frustrating as it
can be long. Website owners most of the times want to do all that they can to
speed the process up. This is a bad idea for many reasons. SEO isn’t meant to
be a fast solution. Below are a few SEO shortcuts to avoid for better results.
No
Keyword Research
The first step of an SEO
campaign is to conduct keyword research for every page of the website.
Obviously this is a time consuming task, especially for a website that has more
than fifty pages. Due to this reason website owners think that’s it’s OK to
skip this step as they “already know what keywords they want to target”. They
think that they do what they want to target, but are those keywords the best
option for them? You simply don’t know what is best for the website until you
conduct research. Keyword research provides website owners with new insights
and keyword competition data. It’s important to target a combination of broad
and niche (long tail) keywords not only for rankings or results but also for
more traffic.
Not
Optimizing Every Page
Owners of large websites
often think that they don’t need to optimize every page, only the “important”
pages like home page or service page. But are they sure that optimizing all of
the pages is not important? All web pages of the website serve a purpose and if
they don’t, consider removing them entirely. The search engines rank individual
web pages with a specific purpose, not websites as a whole. An interior
“Services” page can even rank better than the homepage for some specific
keywords as long as it has built link and trust over time. It’s OK to optimize
the website in phases if it’s a large project, but ultimately every page should
receive SEO attention for optimal and best results.
No
Meta Tag Copyrighting
Meta tags aren’t the ranking
factors as they once were, but they still have a purpose in optimization of
website. The title tag is the clickable link that is indexed and read by the
search engines. The Meta tag description is found beneath the title on a search
engine results page and is like a “sales pitch”. It should include keywords and
get the searcher to click on your page instead of the other results that they
are seeing. The H1 tag is the “header” of the page and the first text that a
spider reads on the page and collects in its memory. Image tags are useful
because a search engine spider can’t “see” the image, so it provides one more
text optimization opportunity to include keywords with images.
Buying
Links
Links shouldn’t be bought,
they should be only earned. The search engines know very well the difference
for both. Most links that are paid don’t hold much value anyway and for a
longtime. Spend your time and best resources on creating quality content to
establish relevant inbound links which help to gain trust and value for websites
in the search engines.
