When crawling your website prior to indexing, Google use a series of algorithms that take into account “ranking factors” of your website including content (words) on each page, links from other websites, the age of your domain name and MANY others. Search engine optimisation takes time, planning and experience to pull off correctly and is best done by a professional. However, if you want to do it yourself, here’s a list of things you shouldn’t be wasting your time on anymore.
Stop using outdated link building strategies
Linking from one website to another is hugely beneficial to the website on the receiving end but getting this link is easier said than done. Many people resort to placing blog and forum comments with low quality “link juice” in an attempt to acquire more inbound links. Strategies such as these yield poor results and can often negatively impact your SEO efforts so try creating content that people want to share on their websites. This will take you more time initially but will pay off greatly in the long run.
Stop creating thin content
In order for your website to be indexed and start ranking for your desired key phrases, Google will want to see good quality, original content. If you copy content from another website, Google won’t ordinarily index your website and you could potentially be impeding on someone else’s copyright.
We recommend taking your time to research your subject and audience, think about what information you want to get across in your content and work to create great content that Google will index.
Stop article spinning
In order to cut down on the time it takes to write content for websites, many website owners have taken to article spinning. This practice involves writing a single piece of content and pasting it into a programme which “spins” the content, making it appear as a separate piece of content although still essentially being the same as the original.
Even with the most sophisticated article spinning programmes, the end result is often difficult to read with. The errors that are produced are very easy to rectify but this extra step will often involve time that could have been better spent on writing original content that would have had a better chance of being indexed.
Stop keyword stuffing
Whilst creating your unique, SEO-friendly content, you’ll need to be mindful of trying to avoid using too many of your keywords. It’s a difficult balance to get but most experts recommend keeping your keyword density to around a few words per paragraphs. There’s no definitive rule on this but always try to make your content as readable as possible, for Google and your visitors.