Note: This was featured as part of our Web Wednesday segment on Charleston’s 105.5 The Bridge with Box in the Morning. You can catch us every Wednesday morning at 8:20 am ET for your dose of social media & digital marketing news. You can listen to the segment below:
At The Modern Connection, we work in all aspects of digital marketing. This includes best practices for your company website and blog, and helping your business to rank better in search results. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which consists of practices that you need to implement in order to show up higher in organic search results.
For example, if someone is hungry and really craving a burger, they’re going to get on Google and search for a burger place near them. If your restaurant sells burgers and you’ve done your SEO correctly, they’re going to discover your website & social media pages during their search, and then hopefully head to your establishment to grab a burger. And if they really love it, you’ve gotten yourself a repeat customer.
On the other hand, if your SEO isn’t up to par, and you’ve made any of these five mistakes, they’re going to find a burger somewhere else, and you may have missed out on a customer. Lesson learned: don’t lose business because your SEO needs work. Make sure you aren’t making these mistakes.
- Keyword stuffing.
Yes, keywords are the, well, key for showing up in search results. However, if you’ve written your website copy in a way that essentially stuffs 15 different versions of one keyword into it, that’s going to throw up a big red flag for the search engines. You want to make sure that your copy flows well. Of course you want to incorporate effective keywords that represent your business, and you want to do it in a way that makes sense and that sounds natural.
- Your website has broken links.
If you haven’t updated your website in years, chances are that you have more than just a couple of broken links, or links that no longer direct to the correct page. Search engines want to send users to websites where they’ll have a good user experience, so if your website has several broken links, it’s not going to rank well in search results.
- Plagiarism.
This should seem like an obvious no-no, but it’s still something that happens all too often. Whenever you’re writing your website copy or blog posts, never use the same copy that you found on another website. Search engines will push your website down and may even de-index it altogether.
- Duplicate content on your website.
Copying others is a big no-no, but copying yourself is just as bad. You may think that you have all of this awesome content because you’ve created 100 pages of the same thing. Google recognizes this, and crosses duplicate pages out, leaving you with your content not being ranked.
- Poor content.
If you haven’t noticed, pretty much all of these mistakes have to do with your content. That is because in the day and age of digital marketing, content is King!!! SEO today is all about good, well written, and well researched content. The search engines are able to recognize content that was poorly written and doesn’t offer much value and won’t rank that page well in search results.
The SEO rules that apply today are extremely different from rules that applied even a couple of years ago. Whereas when SEO first became a thing, it was easy to play the system, the algorithms now are so sophisticated that you really have to make sure that you’re making all of the right moves to get rewarded by high search rankings.
Need some help with your website’s SEO? Call us at 1-800-759-7996 or fill out our free consultation form!
