Are Links Still Important For SEO?

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The Top SEO Mistakes you Could Be Making

Good SEO (search engine optimisation) is vital if you want your website and content to rank well in Google and other search engines. High search engines rankings lead to free, organic traffic that could make or break your website’s success. Without the help of an expert, if you’ve been doing your own SEO, then you could potentially be making classic SEO mistakes that will do more harm than good. In this article, we’ll highlight some common SEO mistakes people make so you can avoid them or rectify them.

A Lack Of Keyword Research

Search results are largely based on keyword phrases that people search for. If you haven’t been using a quality keyword research tool to find appropriate keywords, you’ll be missing out on traffic. What you’re ultimately searching for are keyword phrases that are popular, but don’t have a lot of competition when it comes to other websites targeting them.

This is where a good keyword tool comes in really handy, as it will give you this vital data so you can make the right keyword choices for your content.

You’re Not Publishing Content Consistently

It’s also important to publish content on your site consistently, as the search engines respond favourably to this. A website that looks stagnant and stale won’t get much love from Google and the other search engines, as it looks like it’s been forgotten about and that the content may be old or less relevant.

Aim to publish new content consistently, possibly even once a week at least.

A Lack Of An Active Presence On Social Media

To help with positive SEO, search engines now look for social signals, so you’ll want to create an active presence on social media channels such as:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• And others...

Post content and updates regularly to your channels and link back to pages on your website. The more love your social media posts get, the better it will be for your website’s SEO goals.

You’re Posting Thin Or Low Quality Content

Thin or low quality content refers to content that is either too short or simply doesn’t really offer anything of value to the visitor. Even if you write a blog post that’s not very long, try and think about what you can include that will give the reader something useful to take away. Study your competitors and see what you can write about that they might not have covered, or covered in-depth. Doing this can really give you a leg up on your competition, and it’s a competitive world out there online.

Not Following Best Practices for Internal Links

To begin with, you want to link to other content on your site. Failure to do this makes it more difficult for the search engine bots to crawl your site and to understand the nature of your website’s content and navigation.

What’s also important is to link to content that’s relevant to the post you’re linking from. It’s wise to choose appropriate anchor text (the text you’re highlighting for the internal link), anchor text that makes sense when compared to the page of content it’s linking to.

Add at least one or more internal links to each post and make sure they are “do follow” links.

Your Website Is Slow To Load

One of the most important pieces of criteria for modern websites is they must load quickly. If you have pages on your site that are slow, or your entire site is slow to load, you are going to drop down in the search engine rankings compared to competitor pages that load fast.

It’s an impatient society we now live in, especially online, so speed is vital if you want your content to rank well and get consistent traffic. Even if you do rank well, if someone visits your site and a page takes forever to load, they’re simply going to leave.

A Lack Of Blog Post Promotion

Every time you post a new blog post on your website, be sure to promote it. Don’t just post and forget about it. Create relevant social media posts that link back to your new content. This will get the post some initial traffic, as well as providing positive social signals for the search engines.

Anywhere online that you can think of to mention your new blog post, be sure to do it. Promotion is everything when it comes to getting decent website traffic from any source, not just the search engines.

Building Inbound Links Way Too Fast

Google and the other search engines love backlinks, as it makes your website look popular and the search engines also assume your content is valuable enough for someone to link back to.

However, if you build these backlinks too quickly it can look unnatural. Google loves natural backlinks. This isn’t to say that you can’t submit guest posts to other relevant websites in order to get a backlink. Just don’t do too much too quickly or it will look spammy and potentially have a negative result.

Try and keep your backlink profile as natural as possible and take your time.

Low Quality Backlinks

Low quality backlinks can also be a contributor to poor or negative SEO. If your website is getting linked to by many low quality or spammy websites, then this is going to harm your rankings.

There are tools out there that can help you analyse the quality of backlinks, so you can try and remove the links that may be causing harm to your rankings. You might need to enlist the assistance of a SEO expert for this if you’re uncertain.

In Conclusion

If you focus on good SEO and try your best to avoid these common SEO mistakes, in time your website will be receiving the search engine love it deserves. A little effort, due diligence and patience goes a long way.

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The Most Affordable SEO and How To Do It

I’ve been asked what the lost affordable SEO is that you can do.

The most affordable SEO strategies are those that involve you undertaking activities yourself, on your own website, as part of your business activities. This constitutes what we can call “Natural SEO”. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to do this. Think about this process:

1. A potential customer asks you a question about your service or product.  It’s a great question and you realise that it’s a question that is often asked, and so you deice to write a blog post about it.
2. You write the post and its about 1000 words long.  You load it to your blog.
3. It talks about the service or product, so you link the product name in the post to your product page (or service).
4. Your post mentions many benefits of the product, so you create a basic graphic of that list, which summarises the benefits. You save that graphics as “benefits-of-using-product-name.jpg” and embed it into your post.  It makes the post look better and you like the graphic, so you also post it to your Instagram account and to your Pinterest account.   Other people like it so they repost.
5. You really like the post so you mention it on your Facebook page, and also your Twitter page.   other people like your social media post to they repost it.
6. Someone else writing on a very popular website about your industry loves your post and links to it from an article they are writing on their own website. They also post their article our to social media.
7. At the bottom of your blog post someone asks a question in the comments about the product.  You decide the best way to answer that is to grab your phone and film the product while you answer the question.  You post the video to your YouTube account and in the video description put a link to the product page.  You also embed the video into the bottom of the blog post.

You quite enjoyed putting that info together.  You’ve also undertaken an SEO strategy for that product:

1. You created a blog post which expanded your website, grew your keyword pool and linked to your product page
2. You post is linked to from other powerful websites
3. You gain links from YouTube and other social media channels which are reposted.
4. Your excellent graphic is used by other websites who reference and link to your website as the source. The same goes for your YouTube video.

All of this drives authority through to your product page either directly, or via the blog post.

​​​​​​​Do a lot of this and your entire websites starts to gain authority.

 

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