The BMG Twitter Chat on July 27th was on How To Spot Bad SEO: 8 Traps You Don’t Want To Fall Into!
Are you spending valuable time, energy and money on your company’s SEO? Or is some other company is paying you big bucks to manage their SEO? Here’s a little bit on how to avoid SEO scams, and how to provide better SEO services! Watch out for these 8 SEO traps…
Trap #1: Making Promises that are Too Good to be True: Promises that seem too good to be true, usually are too good to be true. Fact: Reputable SEO firms don’t guarantee #1 rankings, fast results, or any other over the top promises. Be smart, and trust your intuition.
Trap #2: Using “Black Hat” SEO Techniques: This means bending the generally accepted rules established by search engines. Key word stuffing, doorway pages, invisible text, and linking schemes are all no-no’s. Play the game fair, because if you don’t, it will hurt your company in the end!
Trap #3: Targeting the Wrong Keywords: Make sure you’re paying for an ACCURATE list of keywords around which to focus your SEO. Longer, more specific phrases are more beneficial than over-used words (Example: “office furniture” as opposed to “adjustable leather office chairs.” Get it?).
Trap #4: Employing Schemes: Attracting high-quality inbound links to your website is key. But beware, not all inbound links are valuable. Don’t go for e-mail link prospecting (“cold calls” asking to include a link back) and link trading are not great ideas.
Trap #5: Promising to List Your Site in Hundreds of Online Directories: Not all online directories are worth investing your time, energy, and money. Instead of hundreds, focus on a few good ones, like Yahoo Business Directory, Business.com, and The Best of the Web Directory.
Trap #6: Redesigning Your Site or Creating New Pages w/o 301 Redirects: Need to redesign your website? Great! Make sure 301 redirects are being used to properly guide visitors to the new page. Without them, your new page could be worthless.
Trap #7: Creating Bad Content: Content is king when it comes to SEO. Make sure the content on your webpage isn’t just heavy on the key words and light on actual value. It’s got to be just the right balance!
Trap #8: Offering a One-Time Fix with No Ongoing Maintenance: Lastly, SEO is not a one-time project, rather, it’s a process! Refreshing content, adding inbound links, and tweaking the keywords strategy regularly are extremely important!
The presented material is from an article called “How To Spot Bad SEO” on Hubstop (http://www.hubspot.com/). It’s an awesome resource for SEO, social media, and online marketing. In this article, there are actually 10 Ways To Spot Bad SEO–I intentionally left two out (two good ones!). If you’re curious as to what they are, visit www.hubspot.com. The article goes very in-depth; I learned a lot. Definitely a worthwhile read!
Tune in with us next week on Wednesday, August 3rd at 7:30pm EST!
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