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.
Houston SEO And Link Building: What You Really Need To Know
Over time, SEO strategies continue to change, but there is one constant that remains. This constant is how important high-quality inbound link building is for increasing higher search engine rankings and brand recognition. If you head a startup up own your own small business, your Houston SEO efforts need to have inbound link building includes as part of the overall marketing plan for your company.
What Is Inbound Link Building?
Inbound links, in their most basic form, are links that are on external sites that link back to your own website. They may link to a specific page or blog post on your website.
As part of Google’s ranking algorithm, several factors are evaluated by Google including the inbound links of your website in order to determine where your website should rank. However, Google goes beyond that. It also evaluates the authority and relevance of the external website that links back to yours. Is it an authoritative website? Does the site have relevance and a trustworthy history in its industry? So, does that website linking back to your site needs to have a high-quality reputation in order to have a positive influence on your Houston SEO?
What Benefits are Provided by an Effective Inbound Link Strategy?
When you use link building effectively as part of your Houston SEO strategy, what occurs?
Benefits offered by external link building include:
Improved brand visibility: Links coming from external websites that use the brand name of your company help to improve the brand recognition of your business.
Higher search rankings: Backlinks coming from authoritative external websites increase rankings and boost the domain authority of your site.
Long-term value: Over time the impact that external links have to continue to strengthen, providing you with long-term advantages for many months into the future.
Inbound Link Building Facts
Inbound link-building definitely plays an essential role in all search engine marketing plans. However, link building is frequently confusing and difficult. Link building, unlike the fundamental Houston SEO approach of publishing informative content, isn’t a straightforward process.
When it comes to link building, another fact that is somewhat confusing is that it does take some time for you to start seeing positive effects. Not even the most highly effective Houston SEO link building approaches will produce immediate results for you. Inbound links offer great advantages both in helping to build your search engine rankings as well as your site’s domain authority in ways that other SEO strategies cannot. Link building is one of the fundamental components of any successful SEO plan.
Solutions For Inbound Link Building
The quantity of authoritative inbound links impacts search engine rankings directly. A long-term effort is required by link building. If you are searching for an experienced and reputable SEO company that has a prove record of providing inbound link building solutions that are successful, give our professionals a call.
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.
You know that it is important to reach out to prospective followers on various social media marketing platforms. However, which ones should you use?
What other questions do you have swirling around in your head – those that are causing a delay in you getting started with a digital media marketing plan that could be potentially very successful.
Give Yourself A Break
This is great for many industries to start planning for 2019. Everyone wants to have a fantastic year, right?
Questions you should consider before you begin:
Who is my target audience?
Where can I find my target audience?
Which digital media platforms should I use?
Why are Social and Digital always mentioned in the same sentence?
What are the potential social media and digital marketing platforms?
Let’s start with the basics. Where are all of your personal contacts and family having conversations about the businesses in your local area? Wherever that is – that is an excellent starting point. Depending on what kind of business you own, the “guaranteed activity” will really dictate where your marketing efforts can be taken. Begin with something you know that you can get somebody to share or comment on your post.
Facebook Marketing Platform
Begin with Facebook – You are on Facebook, right? If you aren’t, then get a Facebook page. You are missing out on a lot of fun. Seriously, Facebook is most likely the easiest one to start out with. Get a business page created – that can take some time since you may need to run some information down and picture to get going on it.
A Facebook business page is easy to get set up – just click on Create A Page when you are logged in on your personal account. These two types of accounts only overlap when you actually want them to. You can toggle between your new business page and yourself fairly easily right on the profile photo above any comment that you want to make.
After you get your business page set up, what should you say? Just ask yourself if you were your own client, what would you want to know? You might need directions to your retail store or office. That is a very good start. You can say something like, “come visit us and say hello at *** Road, Houston, TX. You could maybe offer a service or product review on something you are selling or offering. It is that simple.
Until you have a couple of followers, you won’t be able to obtain a custom name for your Facebook page (custom URL). Facebook sometimes requires 15 or 30 followers. You could get a great post created, make sure you check your grammar and spelling, create or find a great image for promoting your page, and then spend a bit of money for your post to be boosted.
Find out more by visiting our blog. Call or contact Found Me Online today if you have any immediate questions about starting your Houston digital marketing campaign!
Trouble Getting Your Site to Rank? Find Out What Is Wrong By Consulting Our Houston SEO Agency Part III
My Site Won’t Rank & I Want To Know Why
You might treat your site as if it resides in a vacuum, but guess what? Search engine optimization doesn’t live in one because it exists in content. It also exists in other online components such as pay-per-click and social media.
We don’t want to sell your services. We are just pointing out that internet marketing is holistic. In fact, it’s more now than ever before.
There are many elements that play a role in how a site gets ranked. This includes how many people click through it and how long they stay on your site. The number of times your site is mentioned on social media and the engagement you receive affects it too.
Some things that affect rank are more direct than others. Regardless, all components are crucial. Google looks at many signals when they rank websites.
This doesn’t mean that going on Facebook and posting all the time will help rank a site. We’re saying you need to actually build a community on social media sites and get people to visit your site, read content on your site and click on your links. These are a few things that can help get a better rank.
With that said, there are a few reasons why a site doesn’t get rank, and the most common one is the competition is doing more than you. You might be doing a vacuum too. This is sort of speaking.
SEO is not some secret. In today’s world of marketing, SEO is a necessity. Every time you fail to link to content from your blog posts is another way you’re falling behind the competition. Even if you think you’re doing plenty, someone eventually will show you up.
Maybe you’ve been testing the waters of SEO. If so, your site’s rank should improve over time. Remember, now is the time to jump into SEO because many other companies have gotten the results you are wanting to get.
Keep in mind that use only ethical SEO techniques and that SEO is all about going against your competition. They are the ones you should be focusing on. After all, they are trying to do the same thing you’re doing, and that is beat or continue to beat their own competitors.
Small Changes Can Make A Huge Difference
You’re right in thinking you have a lot of work to do. This is exactly why you need to get the ball rolling now, even if you’re just going to make small changes. Before doing anything, like hiring an SEO agency, you should first make small changes.
It takes time to rank a website. If your website doesn’t eventually rank, then it’s time to make some big changes. Whatever the case is with your site, start off small and focus on making small changes. Doing this can make all the difference in the world.
A good link profile made up of links from a variety of sources is necessary, period. Even though this is true, some links are no good, and may even have a negative effect on ranking. Similarly, buying links is not recommended. Also bad for you are link schemes. To build the right link profile, avoid using strategies that are bound to get you flagged, by adopting a natural approach.
Furthermore, there are bad links of course. These include the following scenarios:
These come about when someone with an ill intent targets your website. This simply refers to the use of unethical tactics on your website by some people.
Actually, there is no reason to do this for such people. They simply choose to inject malicious code on the targeted website. Another approach is to scrap your blog(s) and publishing all the content therein again. Using questionable websites to build links to your site is also a common tactic.
Note that Google can pick up on harmful SEO attacks quite easily. Knowing this, however, you do not want to take chances with your site and the many penalties that may be attributed to such attacks. As such, being vigilant at all times is a wise decision.
Being Penalized By Google
Your website may also rank poorly as a result of Google penalties. Google may slap your website with penalties due to some sort of unprofessionalism. The complete removal of the website from the Google SERPs (search engine result pages) is the most severe penalty action.
Hence, you should know automatically that your website is on the wrong side of Google’s SEO rules if you notice a huge drop, but not complete removal, in the rankings after enjoying a great position on the SERPs. To you, this should mean that you are being penalized because there is something wrong on your website.
To resolve this situation, you should get down to correcting the highlighted problem(s) after checking the Google Manual Action report. You should understand that the Google team, and not robots, will have manually checked your site and uncovered that it does not comply with the search engine’s guidelines, the moment you receive the report.
What are some of the factors behind such measures?
Your website will be penalized by Google if the individual going through it:
Discovers that it has been hacked: Simply means that hackers uploaded or hid hateful information on your website after gaining unauthorized access/control
Discovers the use of User Created Spam: Discovering the use of, on the forum or blog, spam comments
Discovers the use of spammy structured markup: This translates into the use of on-page markups that are not allowed. For instance, the use of content that cannot be seen by website users.
Discovers the use of spammy free hosts: Using spammy service hosted pages
Discovers unnatural links originating from the site: This means the creation of links that are unnatural from your site
Discovers unnatural links linking to your site: The opposite of the above
Discovers the use of low-value content: The information contained in pages must offer value to users
Uncovers the use of Clocking or Sneaky Redirects: Displaying, to Google and users, different pages
Discovers the use of Clocked Images: Trying to increase clicks by using manipulated images
Discovers the use of Hidden Texts and Keyword Stuffing: Google does not entertain the use of these tactics anymore, even though they used to work in the past.
Trouble Getting Your Site to Rank? Find Out What Is Wrong By Consulting Our Houston SEO Agency Part I
Have you ever wondered why your site is not ranking well enough? You may look online, type a few different keywords into the search engine, and then notice other sites are at the top of the results pages instead of your own website. You are not alone in wondering why this is happening to you. The truth is that there is more than just one reason why you may not be ranking the way that you want to on the search engine sites. If you have been putting forth the effort and feel like you are not seeing ideal results, you may want to consult an SEO agency in Houston or here are a few things you need to know.
You May Lack Of Patience
Improving your rankings is something that takes some time. It usually does not happen overnight, so if you are expecting the best results in a matter of days, you need to start thinking more realistically. It is going to take you some extra time to put your search engine optimization strategy into overdrive. Once you have developed a strategy, you must follow a series of steps to get to where you would like to be.
When you do not follow the right steps, you will struggle to see the best results. You must put a lot of energy into doing research on different techniques and coming up with a creative strategy that works correctly for your business. Not all businesses have the same success with the same types of strategies. It is even going to take time for you to create your content and get it out there for others to see.
Even after you have made some major changes to your website, Google may not notice these changes at first. As a result, you must be patient and wait to see what Google thinks of your website in terms of its relevance to the keywords people are looking up on the search engine site. It often takes months to see great results. In fact, some business owners will not see the absolute best results until they have continued on with their SEO strategy for an entire year.
It is not always easy to remain patient when you want to see results immediately. However, patience and persistence will get you further.
There Are More Meanings To The Keywords You Have Selected
Some of the keywords you have decided to use on your site to help with rankings could potentially have more than just a single meaning to Google. The difference in meanings could have an impact on the way that your site ranks on the search engines. It all goes by what Google believes the user is searching for when they are typing the word into the search engine to find specific information. For example, if you offer a product and someone searches for one of the related keywords, Google may provide detailed information on what that product can do and what it is commonly used for rather than listing sites that sell the specific product.
Some of the space on the first page of Google is covered in paid advertisements while other spaces are taken exclusively by Google. Just when you might think that your page is not going to rank on the first page for a specific keyword, you may eventually notice that it is ranking all over again. It is not always easy to determine if your site will appear on the first page or not, but the best thing for you to do is to remain quite consistent. There are times when it may be more of a challenge to rank on the first page simply because certain words have more than one meaning and the meaning may differ to Google.
Your Website Lacks Something
Having a well-designed website is crucial. However, there is much more that needs to go into your website than just the design of it. While you do need to make sure it is aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate, your website must include the right content. In fact, everything on your website should be properly optimized.
No matter how good your website might look, you are going to have trouble ranking if you are not implementing certain search engine optimization strategies throughout the pages of your site. You should regularly post relevant, high-quality content, include tags for content and images, have a mobile-friendly version of your site, include authoritative links in the content you have created, and even add meta descriptions. These are just some of the many things you should do if you want your well-designed website to rank better on the search engines.
