Time flies in the business world and the search engine sector changes faster than most. Something that was once a safe marketing trick can suddenly become useless – it could even cause your site to be ejected from search rankings. Or search engines can suddenly start to give weight to new elements … without telling anyone.
This month, let’s clear the air and browse through some of the search ranking myths. To make sure you are not penalized by search engines – or simply ignored – pay attention to these 5 deadly search engine marketing errors …
Killer 1 search rankings: spamming or stuffing keywords
If people search for your keywords and you have more in more places on your website, Google will place your page on top, right?
This is exactly how this search engine marketing strategy worked ten years ago, until too many people passed it, researchers started seeing irrelevant results at the top of search rankings and Google changed the way in which he classified the pages. Nowadays, Google’s algorithm (the formula it uses to understand where to classify pages in search results) is much more complex than that, thanks to years of relationships with people trying to play the system.
Don’t worry about these marketing tricks on obsolete search engines:
Typing keywords over and over again in very small characters at the top and bottom of the page – blocks of lowercase text in the copy or header tags don’t improve your relevance
By increasing the density of keywords over about 10%, you end up with a page full of text that makes no sense to anyone who reads it
Invisible text or keywords in white text on a white background: this old search engine on marketing engines is so frowned that it can get you completely deleted by Google
The only foolproof search engine marketing strategy is still to find out what kind of quality, relevant information your customers are looking for and then provide it.
Killer 2 search rankings: use of irrelevant keywords to attract more traffic
So, you’ve found great keywords with low competition and excellent traffic numbers … but aren’t you completely focused on your website?
Just because Paris Hilton was the most searched term in the country (according to Google’s 2007 statistics), that doesn’t mean that an article about you on your website will increase your traffic and your sales.
I know it’s tempting to get high-traffic keywords on your page just for the increase in traffic, but you have to wipe them out or start another website. What happens is that people can come to your page or your website looking for a keyword phrase and find that your site has nothing to do with it. So they leave!
Effective search engine marketing is based on getting qualified traffic. All the traffic in the world won’t help you if it’s out of target. Even if you could have some extra visitors, it will definitely lower your conversion rate.
Killer 3 search rankings: useless content
I can’t tell you how many articles and blog posts of low quality I see every day that are just subtly masked search engine marketing tactics designed to get better search rankings.