Searching For Answers; Why SEO Isn’t Working For You

Search engine optimization has enjoyed a rocky road in the eyes of most marketing campaign managers. Prominence on search engines is important, and that importance when recognized sent SEO rocketing up the list of priorities. But now there are many who consider is less effective than it once was. That’s not true, however. The practice still works, you just have to better consider how you use it. In particular, you need to make sure you’re not sabotaging it with any of the SEO roadblocks mentioned below.

You’re misunderstanding the practices. This is perhaps the main reason by a lot of people who try to use SEO use it wrong. They’re still working like the practice is just fresh. In particular, the biggest culprit is the technique of keyword stuffing. This is the act of taking every possible keyword that has even the scantest relevance to a web page (or no relevance at all) and using it in the meta-data. This is how many people still think keywords work, but it has long been recognized as an unethical practice and thus will actually work against you. Instead, use keywords responsibly, choosing carefully those that hold most relevance to both the content and the potential visitor. 2-5 percent keyword density is considered the optimal amount at the moment.

Your site is just bad. A site that doesn’t work well is going to sink right to the bottom of a search engine’s list of priorities. You have to be a lot more vigilant in how you run it. For instance, if you’re having issues with downtime, you have to consider a more reliable web host that is better suited to the specific needs of your site. You need to use one of the many available tools that can run through the site, as well, helping you to identify any dead links. Search engines pick up on these errors and they play a bigger role than you might imagine.

Think content quality. A lot of people will just throw up as much content as they can with little regard for how good it is or who it’s targeted at. This is much the same as keyword stuffing. More content is good, yes, but it has to be quality content. Search engines pick up on hastily written and error-riddled pieces. If it’s poorly researched or otherwise has no value to your user, then Google picks up on it. It makes use of algorithms that are designed to find the content that’s unoriginal, spammy or otherwise ‘thin’. There’s no cheating when it comes to content. You have to put the work in and think about what value it actually offers the reader. Otherwise, you’re working against yourself anyway. What’s the point of a site with a strong online presence that attracts visitors but is unable to retain them?

The way SEO has changed has made it a lot harder to ‘cheat’. You have to work to create good content, to make it relevant, and to have a site that’s worth visiting. Once you have those three critical elements, you should find a lot more visibility on search engines.