Common SEO Mistakes That Affect Domain Traffic
Search engine optimization is one of the most common ways for businesses to increase traffic to their domain. Unfortunately, this deceptively simple concept can become confusing and frustrating for beginners. It’s usually a good idea to hire a professional SEO service provider, but even that doesn’t guarantee results. Business owners interested in increasing domain traffic and building a stronger online presence need to be able to spot mistakes that can be made. Being able to spot these mistakes could mean the difference between successful online marketing and wasting hundreds of dollars on bad service. Here are a few common SEO mistakes that you can avoid…
Black Hat is Old Hat
Many low-end SEO service providers use what are called Black Hat strategies. These strategies will not only not provide increased traffic, they could reduce the page rank to the point that a site is not even listed on popular search engines. Keyword stuffing is a common strategy. By using a keyword as many times as possible, even if it doesn’t make sense, some SEO providers will negatively impact a site’s rank. It’s also common to see keywords stuffed into the main content in the same color as the background of the page, making them invisible to the human eye. This strategy will get most pages flagged as spam and removed from most search engine results.
White Hat Offers a Lasting ROI
Conversely, White Hat strategies focus on what the users sees. Although this might seem like a legitimate strategy with ethical practices, it’s not what SEO providers should focus on. Users want to find current, relevant, and informative content when they visit a page. Having high-quality main content on a page is important, but that content also has to be formatted for web crawlers too. The software used by search engines to sort websites, called a web crawler, cannot see most of the things humans perceive. This makes optimization of the main content on a page important for the purposes of making the site more visible to search engines.
SEO vs. SEM
SEM,or search engine marketing, is also a very common practice. When a user searches for products and services online they are presented with results in order of most valuable to least valuable. In most cases those results are shown directly below small Pay Per Click advertisements that look similar to search results. Mistaking SEO and SEM is a common mistake that can very different results.Service providers such as Simplemachine can help businesses avoid these kinds of SEO Mistakes and create an effective and dynamic digital marketing plan.
