We know that SEO trends are hard to catch up on. Of course, since they are trends, they have to change in the course of the year to keep up with the demands and calls for action set up by the consumers. However, there are also some SEO managers who would cut corners and thus commit bad SEO habits.
Stop that right now! Did you know that bad SEO habits won’t offer long-term benefits for your website? Though you may experience a few positive things from it, in the long run you’ll still get the bad end of the stick and this is something you don’t want to happen to your site. For example, search engines will penalize you with either low ranking or no rankings at all. Some bad habits may also make or break your website which can prove to be a risky ordeal.
So here are some bad SEO habits that you need to break away from.
The first bad habit in our list is keyword stuffing.
Just in case you’re aware on the term, keyword stuffing means overloading a page or a website with uneven number of keywords hoping that any of those would be able to hit the jackpot. This would include short or one-word keywords, long keywords (could be phrases and sentences for some), phone numbers, names, and so on. When search engine optimization was still new and search engines were not as complex as today, this was a common practice and worked most of the time. Unfortunately, we have bad news for you – this does not work anymore. In fact, Google is aware of this “technique” and often penalizes websites who still make use of this because these shows poor user experience.
The next bad habit we are going to point out is bot feeding.
Just a bit of technical recap, search engines often come up with relevant, take note of that word: relevant, results whenever a user would type a specific keyword. So if they are using keywords such as web development Arizona, for sure they expect Google to give them websites associated to that search. However, in terms of bot feeding, it means creating websites or page specifically for that term but not really being useful for the user. After all you just want a unique hit. This could be intentional or not but most of the time, websites with such SEO practice get penalized. The best way to get around this is to first look into your website’s purpose then save the SEO for later once you’ve ironed that out.
Finally, one of the biggest offending SEO habits is providing irrelevant content.
Users go to the internet for either entertainment or they need something. When they do comply with the latter, they tend to get frustrated because of the websites they keep on coming across don’t provide the content they are looking for. In short, the website nailed the URL, keyword and description but not the content itself. Today, Google and other search engines are sanctioned penalties for websites with irrelevant content to the keywords.
