Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the surprising driving force behind small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) surge in popularity. This is why entrepreneurships are popping up left and right since it’s much easier to establish a business now than before. However, the popularity of SEO leads to some common misconceptions of what strategies are effective or not.
The dangers of misinformation
Misinformation has always been present in online spaces. In most cases, it’s not direct false ideas that people digest. Instead, it’s a false correlation that they read, which causes them to make the wrong decisions with hopeful expectations. This is why you need to be conscious of the SEO strategies that you think will work the way you want them to.
If you want to optimize your marketing campaigns, here are three SEO practices you should stop doing:
1. Stuffing your landing pages with backlinks
Although it’s necessary to prioritize your marketing copy’s relevance and relatability, it won’t do much without backlinks that can reflect your credibility. Backlinks ensure that your content won’t turn into orphan pages that don’t connect to internal or external pages. However, you need to be mindful of your choice of backlinks and placements.
Like keyword stuffing, you can end up damaging your SEO ranking if you’re integrating too many backlinks with too much information. In the long-term, the practice of maintaining your landing pages by auditing your backlinks will get trickier if you have more than a handful of them on every page. It’s best to exercise quality over quantity when building your links. Don’t link back to five pages if three will be enough to establish your message’s credibility and authenticity.
2. Ignoring anchor text and alt tags
More and more web pages are focusing on visual elements for a more seamless experience for online viewers. Although it can be compelling for human users, it doesn’t improve your SEO ranking. Keep in mind that search engine web crawlers see the elements of your website in text and code. Even though image search is a feature that humans can use, it’s not as effective when computing your SEO rank.
Ensure that your images contain alt tags and anchor texts featuring a precise description of your visual elements. These tags can increase your pages’ visibility since they will appear as a potential result in a person’s search query.
3. Relying on social media to boost your SEO rankings
It’s best to read the next few sentences in this paragraph carefully. Having a large social following is crucial if you want to maintain an online presence. However, your thousands of followers do not translate to a higher SEO rank. This is the misconception that business owners have, which makes them prioritize their social media channel’s growth. Additionally, it encourages some to buy social media followers in the hopes of influencing their SEO ranking.
Consider your social media profiles as secondary marketing channels. Instead of putting all your efforts in it for brand awareness, make sure that it will deliver traffic to your website to give you CTR and conversion rates that count. Keep in mind that online traffic doesn’t directly influence your SEO score. This is why you still need a robust website to maintain your online audience’s engagement.
Conclusion
The digital marketing practices above aren’t inherently harmful to use. Visual content is necessary to attract online viewers. In the same way, social media is an excellent medium to extend your brand’s reach. However, these strategies won’t effectively improve your SEO rank. This is why you need to be clear with your marketing campaigns to ensure that you’re using the right method for the right goals.
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