Learn About The SEO Risks That You Should Avoid And Those You Can Take Part II
SEO Risks That Should Be Avoided
It is worth taking certain SEO risks; however, there are other types of risk that you should not take since they can damage your bottom line and your business. Let’s review the risks that should be avoided.
1. Doorway Pages
It is easy to make doorway pages that are used for certain keyword phrases or keywords. Usually, SEO experts do not use doorway pages since Google doesn’t like them and will often penalize a website that has doorway pages on them. For that reason, you should avoid using any doorway pages on your website.
The only time a doorway page is not penalized by Google is when it provides valuable, unique, and clear content or information for its visitors. This kind of doorway is similar to other content on your website and viewed that way by Google.
Since Google has a negative opinion of doorway pages, you should avoid using them on your site.
2. Neutral Backlinks
Getting high-quality backlinks for your website is something you want, but poor-quality backlinks are something that you want to avoid as much as possible. However, what about having neutral backlinks? These are links that don’t hurt or help your site’s page rankings. Neutral backlinks don’t provide your website with a boost; however, Google is not penalizing your website for having neutral backlinks any longer.
With Google’s latest Penguin update, it was determined by the search engine that websites frequently cannot control which sites link to their website. That is beneficial for website owners since they are no longer being punished for backlinks since they don’t necessarily have control over the links pointing back to their site.
The only way you can tell if there are bad backlinks pointing to your website is if they are spammy and low-quality. Google might take action against those backlinks and manually remove them off of your website.
If no action is taken by Google, then you can assume those backlinks on your website are safe, even when they are not those high-quality backlinks that increase your page rankings in the search results.
Although certain backlinks can be disallowed, you need to be careful. If neutral backlinks are disallowed on your site, you might risk blocking sites that can help with improving your page ranks.
3. Removing Entire Pages From Your Website Or Deleting or Condensing Content From Your site
You might want to remove or delete entire pages from your website about a discontinued product or service. However, once you delete the page, the keywords that were helping your rank your website are not there any longer. The page URL, including the page-specific keyword phrases and keywords, disappear.
Instead of your page rankings taking a hit, you might want to keep these web pages, even if they are for discontinued products or services. Place a message on the page to inform your visitors that there is a similar service or product that is available and supply a redirect link for it.
If you are going to be merging or condensing several pages into one page, make sure to include 301 redirects so that the traffic and links continue.
4. Avoid Using Exact Match Keywords Too Much In Your Anchor Text.
Maybe you think it is a good idea to include your targeted keywords in your anchor text for your site. You are wanting your website to rank for those targeted keyword phrases or keywords.
In the past, this was a very popular practice and SEO experts were following this logic. Unfortunately, technique started to be extensively used by black hat SEO professionals where exact matching keywords were used heavily for their websites. These links were also not coming from high-quality sites.
Since then Google has cracked down on the practice of using exact match keywords in anchor text. On pages and sites where this technique is used, they will be penalized and hurt their page rankings. Therefore, this technique should be avoided. Instead, search for natural ways of creating a diverse backlink portfolio and high-quality websites to link to your site.
5. Avoid Making Numerous Small Changes To Your Website
In general, updating the content on your website is a good idea and Google likes fresh and updated content. However, when you are constantly changing the appearance or content on your website, it can have a negative impact on your page rankings and visitors to your website may be uncomfortable with the constant changes.
Making changes too frequently or making lots of them at the same time may flag your website as being suspicious. Quite often Google penalizes websites that make frequent changes or many changes at once. Therefore, it is better to limit how many changes are made to your website.
Regular site visitors also will notice changes you make to your website, particularly if those changes are made for improving page rankings instead of providing your visitors with more high-quality content. Those changes can also make it hard to navigate your website and make visitors feel suspicious of your site.
Balancing Risk and Reward
Expert SEO needs to be performed to ensure the success of your business. However, there are numerous risky practices that might damage your page rankings. There are also certain risks that may help to improve your page rankings. You need t to learn which SEO risks should be avoided and which ones can be taken.
Although SEO does have certain risks that are associated with, the riskiest thing that you can possibly do is to not perform search engine optimization.
Learn About The Houston SEO Risks That You Should Avoid And Those You Can Take Part I
Many people in the business world appear to have a hard time recognizing the value offered by search engine optimization. There is a lot of information and also misinformation about SEO, and that can make things more difficult for some people. Those who are unfamiliar with SEO may not be able to wrap their heads around the specific techniques that are involved, and this is admittedly compounded by the fact that numerous SEO campaigns may need several months of positive results in order to prove the effectiveness of their strategy. However, after they do, of course, they make significant improvements to a company’s online exposure, in addition to its revenue. However, many businesses are wary of the idea of trying something out that is strange and new to them, and all business decisions do carry some element of risk. There are some risks that can be avoided, while others could result in continuous growth. The question that needs to be asked is what specific SEO risk are great ideas and which ones should you avoid.
However, before we cover all of that, you need to know there is an SEO risk that a business can take that is the worst move possible over all others. That is to not use SEO at all, to begin with. Now that you are aware of that, continue reading to learn the different SEO risks that are out there and the way they break down into avoidable mistakes and acceptable risks.
Search Engine Optimization Risks You Should Consider
1. Making Changes, Both Large And Small, And Then Testing Them
When it comes to search engine optimization, the ultimate goal is getting traffic for your website, followed by transactions coming from the traffic. If nobody visits your website either one those things will happen; although it may feel really good to rank high for specific keywords, what if no one actually uses those links? There may be various reasons behind it, and it may take some time to focus in on the specific reason you are not getting the performance levels that you need or want. Quite often, the only way this can get done is to use A/B testing. You need to go through every element, one at a time, whether that is meta descriptions, content, titles, and more, and test each of them against new variations that you have.
This might be obvious to some people, and be all well and good. So what about all of it is a risk actually? It will probably involve some trial and error to get the right combination of layout and wording that brings your website the most traffic as well as transactions. During this time, most likely you will find combinations that do not work out very well, and therefore you may suffering temporary reductions in traffic. However, the risk is definitely worth it, since you will find the optimum results eventually, and you can focus from there on that specific element to drive more traffic and achieve better returns.
2. High-Quality Backlinks: Giving And Getting Them
Why would a business want to put a link to another company’s website up when it poses the risk that their own users will leave their website? Backlinks have long been the backbone of SEO, and a majority of businesslike to get as many of them as they can. They help with increasing rankings and establishing website authority. However, it isn’t simply a matter of having the most links. At times you will need to return the favor or pay it forward. So although you may bleed some online visitors for links that you post to other good websites, and it will show Google that your website is referencing established authority websites for your own. Just be careful to link only to high-caliber, reputable websites. Websites are known sources of low-caliber links, spammy, malicious or content that is penalized by Google, so make sure you are not one of them, and don’t point a lot of links to these, or get a lot of links from these kinds of websites.
3. Improve Your Website’s Structure
In the perfect world, your main homepage’s URL will be sweet and short. It should, in fact, be your business name, such as “www.yourbusiness.com”. Make sure it is short and sweet, and is concise and easily recalled by anybody who learns your name. On subsequent pages, you can have content that is more specific that features targeted keywords. Even in those cases, it is better to avoid your URLs from spiraling out of control. When they get too long or overly descriptive, the search engines will truncate what is displayed with (….) at a certain cut-off point. So it may be time to change a couple of URLs through overhauling your website structure. When making changes there is always an inherent risk that it will have an impact on your rankings. Whenever you change older URLs and begin to do 301 redirects for your traffic toward new ones, so you most likely will see a couple of dips in traffic and rankings. However, whenever you are doing things right, it should result in you having a new streamlined structure that will do wonders for the search engines and online users.
4. Overhaul Your Entire Website
Every once in a while, all websites need to have a redesign to update them. That always is a risk, and it may be an expensive one. So even though it may be time-consuming, eventually you will need to provide your site with a fresh facelift. It may be simply a matter that over time your old website starts to look outdated. It might also be possible that your website was optimized well for the search engine,s but then you find that human users are having a difficult time to navigate it. There could be several reasons why you should look at the side and consider reconstructing it from the ground up. Those types of changes are similar to altering URL structures, since you may see changes to your rankings while Google is re-evaluating your site. Also, you may risk alienating users and consumers that were comfortable with the way your website was. However, although a majority of your users and Google will understand that most websites have to overhauled occasionally, meaning your rankings will bounce back. You will simply have to be patient. What is really good is most likely your updated website will bring many new clients in addition to the ones you retain.
5. Purchasing Expired Or Available Domains
For many reasons, a lot of website owners do not renew their domains, and that make them available for others to purchase them. Purchasing domains that have a history and redirecting them to your website is a potentially simple and fast way to boost how many backlinks your website has and also enjoy some added link juice. However, there are significant risks that are carried with this technique, so you should only do if you really know what you are doing. For instance, the domains need to be related to the type of business you do. They also need to be professional, since when domains get rankings and traffic and send visitors via redirection to your website, nothing will make them angry more than coming to a website that doesn’t have anything to do with what their search was. Also, many expired domains were full of spammy content and links, which will transfer to your website, and risk Google penalties and drops in rankings. However, this specific traffic is quite affordable and may drive a good deal of traffic to your website if you follow best practices.
Key Considerations Regarding Voice Searching And SEO In Houston
Though formerly dismissed by many, the concept of voice-activated searching has taken off tremendously of late. The recent growth has taken experts by surprise as well. As such, it is important for everyone to realize that voice searching must be considered by anyone looking to employ an effective Houston SEO and web design plan.
Why Has Voice Searching Become So Popular?
During the advent of voice assistant technology, most people were amazed by the innovation, but inconsistencies plagued the experience. Responses were often garbled and unusable. However, the rise of artificial intelligence allowed for greater accuracy and sophistication overall. A recent study has shown that the accuracy of voice recognition technology reached 95 percent by the time 2017 rolled around.
As better accuracy became achievable, numerous voice-activated consumer applications arrived on the scene, such as Cortana from Microsoft, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. The ranks of these technologies were also bolstered by the prevalence of mobile devices equipped with voice command capability.
SEO Implications Of Voice Searching
While most folks use voice recognition for commands such as “call home” and the like, the technology is being used more frequently in other ways including for search purposes. It is important to consider how this shift is likely to impact your social media marketing plan in Houston.
Studies have recently shown that requesting directions is among the most frequent commands performed by teenagers and adults alike. Asking for the hours of operation of stores and restaurants is also quite common, it was found.
Research has revealed an uptick in voice searching for things including sales, discounts and other business-centered queries. As a result, voice search optimization must take center stage as you go about crafting your SEO and web design plan in Houston.
How Voice Searching Is Distinctive
The truth of the matter is that Google is always making adjustments to algorithms so that irrelevant results and spam are reduced. Penalties exist to enhance these efforts and to produce results with the highest possible accuracy. Because voice searching is relatively new, refinement of a similar nature is not yet possible.
Users employ voice searching in a different way than they search via text. Those searching via voice usually utilize shorter phrases to make their inquiries than they would in a typed search. Therefore, voice search optimization involves a distinct set of techniques.
Why Time Is Of The Essence Regarding Optimization For Voice Searching
Industry leaders in large numbers are of the belief that searching via voice will take the lead at some time in the future. This may or may not be true, but lots of people are already taking advantage of this capability. The majority of mobile devices are equipped with voice-activated programs and sales via voice assistant have topped $420 million already. The best Houston SEO and web design firms understand that voice search optimization must be part of the services they provide.
