These days, every business knows the benefits of SEO. What they may not know is how to implement it effectively. Information online is often misleading and contradictory, so SEO isn’t an easy thing to DIY!
Unfortunately, many misconceptions persist regarding the best way to boost your position in the rankings. You can avoid these pitfalls by reading on to learn about some common SEO myths.
Buying backlinks works
You’ve undoubtedly heard about the SEO-boosting potential of backlinks: links secured from other sites to your own. However, these links need to be of quality to be effective. That means they have to be relevant and credible.
Don’t resort to black-hat tactics, or you may be penalized. If you pay for backlinks from link farms, the algorithm will detect this! It knows when a link is legitimate or not.
The more keywords, the better
Back when the algorithm was less advanced, website owners crammed their sites with keywords to attract its attention. These days, though, search engines can tell when you’ve keyword-stuffed your content, and this won’t win you any advantages at all.
You should aim for a natural voice instead. Thanks to Google Variants, you no longer have to include forced sounding search terms either. Relevant and well-written content speaks for itself.
SEO is a one-off action
You may have paid an SEO service like Big Fish Local to optimize your website a while back. That doesn’t mean it’s optimized forever, though. Remember that this is a highly dynamic industry with continuous algorithm updates and new companies arriving to compete.
That’s why ongoing SEO services are much more effective. They can maintain your website to keep up with any changes, and they create content on your behalf to retain the relevance of your website.
Updating blog dates keeps them relevant
Because the algorithm rewards sites that produce a constant stream of fresh, quality content, some people believe that they can simply change the dates of their blog posts in a bid to trick it.
Unless you also make substantial changes to the content of your blog at the same time, this simply will not work. However, performing regular content audits to keep your information accurate does have a positive impact on your SEO.
Mobile first doesn’t matter
If you think investing in making your website mobile-compatible is a waste of time, you’re wrong. Google is slowly transitioning to an entirely mobile-first model, meaning only the mobile versions of sites will be indexed by its system.
It’s best to get ahead of this change and start ensuring now that your mobile site offers the same excellent representation of your company as the desktop version.
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Rather than risk making SEO errors that cost you time, money, and credibility, why not hire a professional service that knows exactly what it takes to move your site up the search engine results page?
Big Fish Local has extensive experience in providing specialist SEO services to small businesses of all industries. Using techniques and tools that have been tried and tested, we get concrete results for our clients.
