6 SEO practices that are actually hurting your overall campaign and website

6 SEO practices that are actually hurting your overall campaign and website

When it comes to proper SEO practices, there are plenty of things you can do in order to increase your rankings.  But there are some things that you should try to avoid at all costs if you're not wanting to hurt your websites rankings within the search engines.  In this discussion I will be covering 6 of these SEO practices that are actually hurting your overall campaign and website.

Now these practices aren't anything black hat like link cloaking and hidden text.  These are things that you might not even think could harm your website, but will if you do them enough.  I'm sure you've heard it all and this post may be something that might not teach you anything, but it will help someone, I'm sure of it

Plenty of you reading this know what a backlink is and how to place one, but many might not know how to do it the right way, and that's what can harm your website.  You can hire people to do the work for you, but if they know just as much as you do, your website is doomed.

It's imperative that you read up on proper link building methods and how they can help, or harm, your website within the rankings of Google, especially now with all the major updates they've done.

Here are 6 SEO practices that can actually harm your website, and how you can fix them:


1. Aiming backlinks at you homepage
Now don't get me wrong, I place links and aim them at my homepage all the time, but I do it strategically.  If you haven't done any backlinking in the past, I would avoid the homepage at all costs for the first couple months. 

One thing people do is they try to rank their homepages for their main keywords, which shouldn't be done.  You should use your homepage to rank your domain and business name, not your main keyword.  You can use your sub pages to rank for any keyword you want, so use them.

Build up your sub pages and use optimized content on them.  You will also need to optimized your pages for better SEO as well, but that's not too difficult.  After you do this, you can then aim backlinks at the pages and hope to rank for your keywords.


2. Too Many Anchors
When it comes to building backlinks, you will need to place anchors which are your keywords within your hyperlink so that the search engines know what the link is about.  What people usually do is build 100,000 links in a month and target just 1 keyword.  This is one of the dumbest things I've seen in a long time and it should never be done.  How often do think Google sees legitimate websites getting 100,000 backlinks with the same anchor each month?  A lot actually, but it's because people don't know what they're doing lol

What you'll want to do is vary your anchor text by adding your URL as an anchor, various keywords aimed at specific pages as well as your domain name and the words "About Us" and "More Info" all linked back to your pages.  Varying your anchors will help much more than getting all the same anchors in your links


3. Get NoFollow Links
People usually target DoFollow links because they help with increasing the rankings for specific search terms.  It's a great idea if that's all that mattered, but it doesn't.  You'll need to splash in some NoFollow links as well to make everything look more natural.

No website will get only DoFollow links aimed at it's pages, there are always NoFollow links in the mix.  So don't worry if there are NoFollow links aimed at your website, they actually help in the long run


4. Not Enough Content
You will always need content on your website, there's no getting around it.  If you put up an amazing website but have no content, your competitors crumby looking design will always outrank you no matter what you do.

Content is king, and it has been that way for a very long time.  With Googles algorithm change prioritizing high quality content, you will need it more than ever in order to rank higher for your keywords.

You can write up the content yourself or hire someone like me to write it for you


5. Blogger Outreach Done Wrong
We all know what guest posts are and most of us know that getting them on high authority websites is like a golden ticket to the top of the rankings for your keywords.  There are a lot of top blogs out there for any specific niche you're in which will gladly let you put your content on their pages for free, and some for a small fee.  But in reality, most guest posting inquiries never get answered.

They don't get answered for tow main reasons:

1. Your pitch is an obvious template that you wrote up once and is worded in a way so that you can send it out to any blog and it will "work" as an inquiry.  You will need to write a unique pitch for each blog you're trying to contact because they will see this as dedication and you will get a higher response rate.
2. Your writing just isn't that good.  People will assess you based on your pitch, and if the pitch isn't good, you won't get a response.  You could take some writing classes or just read some books on how to write properly and you will get a better response rate from your pitches.

Take some time on your pitches and you will notice that you get a bigger, and more positive, response from the people you're contacting.


6. No Structural Linking Plan
One of the main mistakes people do is to not have a structural link plan when that start link building.  Almost all SEO's and marketers have done this one in the past, myself included, but it's when we started out and have since learned from our mistakes.  People commonly think that if you put up a fancy website with some good content that people will gravitate towards it, which is false.  You need to have some backlinks and proper on page optimization in order to rank high for your keywords, but you need a plan even before that.

If you are doing this all yourself, you need to sit down and draw up a game plan on how you want your link profile to look.  You will need a good link diversity and also have all sorts of high authority and low authority links mixed together.  Mix in your NoFollows and DoFollows with varied anchor texts and get to work. 

If this isn't something that you would want to do yourself, simply outsource it to a company like my own and get it done right the first time lol



In Conclusion:
There are many ways to screw up your own SEO, but the ones I went over are the less known ones because people usually don't talk about them much.  They're obvious to most people, we just don't think about them when we're working on our backlink campaigns, but we should. 



Remember to follow me
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/Razzy


Thanks!

Razzy