SEO changes fast and it doesn't take long to fall behind the curve, especially as a business owner doing your own SEO. Today we are going to look at five mistakes that most of you are making and chances are, you didn't have a clue you were making them.
Page Rank used to be a good metric to look at when evaluating the quality of a website or how beneficial a back link could be. Some people realized that tool bar page rank was not being update regularly and turned to domain authority as a key indicator. I say forget about both of them! When you are looking for a website to get a link from, look through the site and read the posts; are they well-written? Do they have shares or comments? Is the content relevant to your website? Are there very many posts on the site? If you can answer yes to those questions, you have found a good target site.
After all the Google updates and their massive misinformation campaigns, people are scared to try anything. If your website does not get any traffic from search; what could you possibly have to lose? You could get your site completely de-indexed, but unless you are intentionally using black hat tactics at large scale, the chances are slim to none. You could get a manual or algorithmic penalty, but if you were not getting search traffic anyway, who cares? Just go back to getting referral traffic or paying for AdWords.
You can read a lot of good information online and you can develop a pretty solid understanding of the basics of SEO by reading respected sources. Want you cannot do by reading is measure how well a strategy works in your niche or why it works. If you do not test your own methods and measure the results, you are always going to be following and in an industry that changes so quickly, that is not a good position to be in. To paraphrase a quote I ran across some time ago "it won't take long for the SEO methods you read about online to be abused by lazy SEOs and become ineffective." Again, if you doubt this to be true, just look what happened to guest posting.
Sorry folks, great content alone is not going to get you very far. As a matter of fact, if you do not have a following already, great content won't do anything for you. Promoting content is far more important than producing it at volume. Brian Dean of Backlinko is my favorite example to use for this. If you visit his blog you will see that he often waits months in between publishing posts. That time is spent promoting posts already on the site and if you look at his posts, you will see just how effective that method is. Bottom line, stop writing five posts per week that are junk and start writing and promoting a stellar piece of content.
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If you have done anything with SEO, you should know who Matt Cutts is. Aside from making videos that answer questions less effectively than a politician, Matt works for Google and his job is to prevent people from figuring out how to manipulate the SERPs. If you want a top-level overview of how SEO works and what Google looks for, Matt is a good source of information. If you want to actually learn how to rank on page 1 of Google, stop following his every word religiously and you will get a lot further. Matt works for Google, not your business.
What do you think? Are you guilty of one of these very common mistakes? Let me hear about it below!