SEO Tactics Your Small Business Should Avoid

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Compared to the early days of the internet, getting your business website into a first page spot is now more challenging than ever.

The vast majority of old SEO tactics no longer work simply because search engines have become so sophisticated.

Especially in recent years, updates like Google Penguin have turned SEO into an ever changing process.

Not only do modern search engines evaluate an increasing number of ranking factors, but they also identify and penalize websites that are using outdated or black hat methods.

To keep your business website from taking a serious ranking hit, here are three of the top SEO tactics to avoid using at all costs.

Keyword Stuffing

An unfortunate holdover from how early search engines worked, keyword stuffing in modern times won’t earn you favor with your readers or with Google.

While keywords are necessary and expected, there is a major difference between natural usage and simply stuffing your page with keywords. The first uses keywords in sentences that make sense and are reasonably spaced out. The second involves repeating the same word or phrase over and over again.

Whether it’s for page content or inside your title tags, don’t bother with typing out a keyword twenty times. Instead, focus on having content that reads naturally.

Unnatural Linking

When it comes to search ranking, links are quite valuable as they indicate a connection between your business webpage and other companies’ websites. If done correctly, good linking practices can really boost your website’s visibility and ranking.

However, since making friends with the right people takes time and effort, some business owners try to game the system by using shady link building tactics.

These include being linked to by irrelevant websites, purchasing links, creating a link wheel, or participating in link exchange schemes. However, using any of these underhanded methods will only get your website penalized and possibly removed completely from the search engine index.

In essence, how you link can make or break your website. Take time to build good relationships with reputable sites related to your field. High quality blogging, product reviews, or testimonials can be great ways to start linking successfully.

Website Cloaking

When a website displays one set of content to search engines while showing human visitors something else entirely, it’s called cloaking, which is a deceptive black hat tactic. This method works by misusing redirects.

In many cases, such as if you’ve changed your site address or moved pages around, redirecting website visitors is perfectly legitimate.

However, cloaking is when those redirects are purposely set up so search engines only see and rank the content on the initial landing page rather than following the redirect like human visitors would do.

In addition to being deceptive, cloaking is also frustrating for human searchers. After all, no user appreciates clicking on what appears to be a useful search result and being shown unrelated content or a page full of ads.

With this in mind, it’s not surprising that cloaking is often severely punished by removing the website entirely from search results.

To keep your website from being banned, make sure to avoid shady tactics like the three mentioned above.

Have any questions about SEO Tactics? Please leave them in the comments below.

To your success!
Ken Partain