Aug 10 2011

Bad SEO Approaches That Are Killing Your Site

Search Engine Optimization has been a pillar of the online community for a while now. It’s a buzzword that’s thrown around a lot, but too often online marketing has the SEO tag slapped onto it.

Just because someone says that they’re taking a good SEO approach doesn’t make it true.

If you’re doing any of these things with your site, then you need to take immediate steps to get rectify them because they can do serious harm to the management of your online reputation.

Start with Rep Management

For starters, if you’re asking, “what is reputation management?” then you’re already at a disadvantage. Your online reputation is everything and can be affected by multiple factors.

Your online rep is the face of your business. Look at it as your digital business card and it can be affected by anything from poor content production to bad feedbackthat you or your company has received in the past.

Many would say that probably the biggest SEO mistake is not using SEO. You have to get your search ranking raised if you ever hope to compete against larger companies that are pouring content onto the web.

Your site and services could end up drowning in a sea of backlinks and search hits.

You have to employ all of the online reputation management tools to be competitive in today’s market. If you think you can get by without these services, then you should understand first that all of your competition is already using it.

Make it a Business Habit

Another pitfall is not making SEO a part of your budget or constant approach. You have to constantly be creating and building up your profile.

At a certain point, all you’re doing is maintaining. Budget for this and don’t look at it as a one-time use kind of thing. It’s like saying; “I don’t need to eat because I had dinner last month.” Seeking out professional advice and services on a consistent business will allow you to compete and grow.

Promote One Version

A big time rookie mistake is not choosing THE url you want for your site. This happens when a company has a domain name but doesn’t canonicalize their site.

If you’re not sure what this means, it goes a little something like this: let’s say that your site is called www.mywebsite.com. Canonicalizing is when you make all of the variations of that name, like: www.mywebsite.com and mywebsite.com automatically go to one or the other.

It’s really important to do this because you don’t want to spend all your money on promotion, SEO, and other marketing approaches, to later realize end up promoting different versions of the same site instead of all of the benefits going to one version.

Budget and Ask for Help

Simply saying that you need to use search engine optimization is an understatement. Chances are, if you run a business, you already know this. What’s more important, though, is to know how to use it and when you’re doing things that could jeopardize the success of your site or company.

Get some professional help if you feel you could use more guidance with this issue. Budget for it, because, though it may cost you a little capital now, if youdon’t it could end up costing you everything.

Guest tip by Kevin Kaiser.

4 Responses to “Bad SEO Approaches That Are Killing Your Site”

  1. Robert says:
    August 14, 2011 at 3:06 pm

    Kevin, thanks for the tips. SEO is like a game of chess were you are playing against multiple opponets symultaniously. SEO is always in a state of constent change which makes it challeging and fun. Thus you must learn new approachs and utilize new techniques to stay on top.

    Robert

  2. FD Thomson says:
    August 26, 2011 at 10:29 am

    Kevin, Thank you so much for sharing this information. It gives some idea about the SEO methods to be followed or not to be followed.

  3. Anuj@WordPressSEO says:
    September 22, 2011 at 2:21 am

    SEO is not the Everest neither it is a way of reaching there, so why should I worry about SEO and its approach. If you are a search engine optimizer and you know A-Z about optmization then you should enjoy your industry. You should know your vision and make a plan to achieve them, do it in manner ways and yes, if you got some thing new you should share with others too.

  4. HD Willson says:
    October 12, 2011 at 12:16 pm

    Now-a-days many people treat it as business. As mentioned above, it is better to avoid the above mentioned ways and try to get good results for our website in different good ways.