This is bad news for the SEO industry and businesses that keep getting burnt by bad SEO techniques.
Following are a few stand out practices that SEO teams are still implementing. If you notice any of these they should be brought to the attention of your account manager before any more damage is done.
Keyword Stuffing.
How many key words can you put on 1 page that reflect your business? The usual trick was to put as many of these words on a landing page as humanly possible in the hope it would improve your rankings. Everyone used to do this and it worked well for a while, till Google picked up on this and now penalises this kind of senseless activity.
Thousands of In bound Links.
Once the favourite pastime of SEO companies, this is now huge no go zone. The theory was to get as many links as you can from external websites to your website and optimise 1 or 2 of your main keywords. The philosophy was, the more the merrier. This has now been outlawed by Google and I have seen websites receive massive rank suppression and penalties because of this. The proof of this was as recent as last week, where one web company that was occupying the first spot for the keyword ’web design’ is now a ghost and cant be found online.
SEO linking strategies are OK if they are performed in a slow organic fashion. Trying to fool the system may work in the short term, but ultimately your tactics will be found out and the price you pay will be heavy.
Duplication of Content.
SEO companies that are too lazy to write original content, deserve, in my opinion everything they get. What they do is take pages from other companies sites, alter a few words and claim it as their own. A shameful activity, thankfully that has been picked up by the search engines.
Title Cramming.
Every web page needs a title and some SEO companies will put as many services as they can on a page title. Ideally, a title should be up to 50 characters NOT 500. Title stiffing is bad SEO practice and can lead to poorer online rankings. Titles should be specific to that page and not generic.
Article Submissions.
Writing articles and submitting them to websites that recycle these in the hope of duplicating links across a huge article network used to be a great way to generate links, but will cause no end of headaches once these are syndicated over thousands of sites. A really bad technique and should be avoided at all costs.
Keep articles on your website or as a blog post where it can be regulated.
On Page Audits.
SEO companies should at the very least take a look at your site and make sure that all pages are compliant. Broken links, doorway pages, titles, invalid URL’s should all be checked and fixed before any further SEO is undertaken. Even check the status of the URL to see if it is clean and there are no issues with Google. Go to your web master tools account, pop in the URL and see if there are any messages.
Directory Submissions
Once a great way to get a better ranking, this tactic is a bad way to go and if you see that your website is listed on many directories, you need to stop this practice immediately.
They Do Not Update You, Failute to Communicate
Ideally, you should be reciving reports monthly on the SEO work, such as content marketing, linking strategies, blogging and on page work. Failure to keep clients updated usually means that little or no work has been carried out on your online marketing.
Over Promising
If your rankings have not moved in a couple of months and you still hear the same excuses ( that they need another month or two), then this is a warning sign that the SEO team is taking advantage of you. Expect to see improvements in your rankings within 2-3 months. If not, go elsewhere as they could be harming your URL/website.
Be aware that many SEO firms still work on primitive practices that can have serious negative consequences for your business. If you have been paying for their services and are not seeing good results then you may need to speak to a professional SEO company like Hopping Mad Designs.