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SEO is never an exact science. Trying to cheat your way to the top never works out in the long term, especially when you run the risk of a new Google algorithm update unravelling hours of work (and your website crashing out of the search engine rankings into obscurity as a result).
So, with Google becoming increasingly savvy to webmasters who are using sneaky tactics to boost SEO rankings, we’ve put together a list of five SEO practices you should definitely avoid when trying to achieve better ranking positions.
Along with content, backlinks are one of the most important factors in determining your positions in Google’s organic search engine ranking pages (SERPs). If a website is linking to yours, the link often counts as an ‘endorsement’.
PBNs are essentially a network of ‘authoritative’ websites that are owned by one webmaster and used to build links to their privately-owned domains.
A PBN is usually made up of expired domains with good backlinks. So, by linking back to the ‘money site’ with quality backlinks from each of these domains, webmasters can short-cut their way to those all-important endorsements, without having to reach out to other third-party websites and work on establishing a genuine relationship with them.
However, this optimisation method isn’t as genius as it seems. PBNs can be expensive and can take a long time to build – plus, Google has become savvy to this practice. If it gets even the slightest hunch that you’ve been using a PBN, your site(s) could be penalised. Many SEOs who swear by PBNs have been caught out before and lost their organic visibility pretty much overnight.
Instead of worrying about PBNs, invest your time in reaching out to other websites for quality backlinks, and work with these sites to create content people will actually want to read and link back to. This way, you’ll not only benefit from the power of the links you’re receiving, you’ll also be more likely to benefit from genuine traffic back to your website.
Another technique is to use automated backlinking building tools. Two of the biggest platforms used for this are German Software development and Analytics (GSA), and Sape.
GSA is a software tool which builds backlinks constantly. It automatically looks for suitable new websites and registers with them to create backlinks or submit content. The majority of these links are at the very least useless, and, at the very worst, quickly penalised by Google.
Content is key to SEO and is just as important as quality backlinks when it comes to achieving the organic positions you need to succeed online. You need to be creating and sharing fresh, relevant and authoritative content that people will want to read and share.
Generally, if the content appears on the internet in more than one place and more than one website, it is seen as duplicate. A search engine like Google will only index the content once, meaning that if your page doesn’t make the cut, you won’t rank for it.
It’s not enough to steal some text from another site, then change a few words or sentences and attempt to pass it off as your own. Some SEOs will often do this in an attempt to get around the system. If you really want to dominate the SERPs, you need to be producing completely unique copy for your site that’s also easy and enjoyable to read. This is where the services of a professional copywriter are often invaluable – they will take the time to develop something that can’t be found elsewhere on the web.
This is a technique that was widely embraced by SEOs, say, 10 years ago – but in 2019, it’s likely to do your rankings more harm than good.
In days gone by, webmasters would pick a selection of keywords they wanted to target, then apply them – very liberally! – to a page’s meta tags, content and backlink anchor text. In some cases, they would even create ‘invisible’ text for the page by matching the font colour to the background colour and pack this full of search terms, too. Doing so would indicate to Google exactly which search phrases the page was intended to rank for.
While this would often lead to a boost in search positions, it would undoubtedly produce content that was spammy and difficult to read – and this would be a real turn-off for site visitors.
Keyword placement is still important in terms of SEO. But writing relevant, natural and easily digestible copy and meta tags is the way to go if you want to create something that’s valuable to both the user and Google’s crawler bots.
Cloaking involves telling the web server to display one set of content for the user, and another set of content entirely for the search engine spiders. For example, you as the webmaster might decide to display lots of images or Flash elements to your users in a bid to keep them engaging with the site, but serve a page of optimised HTML text to Google instead of in a bid to help it understand your ranking intentions.
Cloaking involves telling the web server to display one set of content for the user, and another set of content entirely for the search engine spiders. For example, you as the webmaster might decide to display lots of images or Flash elements to your users in a bid to keep them engaging with the site, but serve a page of optimised HTML text to Google instead of in a bid to help it understand your ranking intentions.
When it comes to SEO, it can be tempting to try to achieve some quick wins. But years of experience in search engine optimisation has taught us that Google will always become aware of weak or underhand SEO techniques eventually, and a knock in the SERPs will mean months or years of your work has been wasted.
Set up your site for more sustainable success. Address your page content, invest in a holistic, genuine link building strategy, and make sure your site is easy to navigate from any and all devices. We promise you it’ll be worth it! And if you need help, remember ClickSlice offers a full suite of SEO services.
Internal linking is one of the most effective ways to increase your rankings without spending a dime.
It’s an incredibly simple but effective way to utilise all the power from an existing backlink profile and direct it to the page(s) you want to rank.
When done correctly, you can see massive gains without investing in any additional backlinks.
Do you see why I’m such a big fan?
An Internal link connects one page on your website to another hence the name “Internal”. Here’s an example of an internal link to our homepage.
Internal linking helps spread the authority and power from one page on your site to another, they can also help improve the indexation rate of your new inner pages.
Check out the diagram for an over-simplistic explanation of how you can optimise internal links to help push link juice to the pages you want to rank.
We always carry out internal linking in the first month of taking on a new client, this ensures we are effectively utilising all the power the site already possess. To be precise, its something we actually implement on the third day of every campaign we start and is built into our agency SOPs.
We took on MadeSimpleMedia as a client back in Feb earlier this year. MadeSimpleMedia is a web design company based in Horsham, as a result, the main keyword we targeted was “web design Horsham”. For the data-driven readers, I’ll save you the time.. this keyword has a monthly search volume of 200 and has a respective KD of 34 putting it in Ahrefs “hard” category.
As always, we carried out our internal link process on the third day into the campaign.
We typically have 2 processes we follow for internal linking, each with a slightly different goal.
The main goal for our first method is to find existing internal link opportunities whilst the second is to find the most linked to pages on a site and then create an internal link opportunity.
We recommend using a mix of both to get the best results.
Step 1 – Enter the clients site into google using the below string:
site:clientsite.com + “main keyword”.
For MadeSimpleMedia it was site:madesimplemedia.co.uk “web design Horsham”.
Once entered, you’ll now see all the pages Google deems to be relevant to the keyword or specific phrase.
Step 2 – Use Ahrefs toolbar and download all the results (make sure you have your google settings to show 100 listings per page to get all the results).
Step 3 – Once downloaded, open the spreadsheet and sort the data by URL rating.
Note: URL is the best option to use as it only takes into consideration do-follow backlinks.
You now have a list of pages on the clients site (in order of power) which you can log into and add an internal link.
4 – Once you made all the changes, resubmit the sitemap to Google.
ProTip: Repeat Step 1 but use an LSI keyword instead. Make sure you also repeat using single phrases of the keyword too like “web design” and “Horsham” etc.
Whilst the above process is good, it doesn’t allow you to make the most effective use of the existing backlink profile. For example, a client may have the majority of their backlinks pointing to a page on their site that doesn’t include any elements of the main keyword.. this is where method 2 comes into play.
Goal: Find the most linked to pages on the clients site and update the content to create an internal link opportunity.
Step 1 – Enter the clients site into Ahrefs and click “Best by links” under pages. This will show you the most linked to pages on the site.
Step 2 – Filter the list by UR rating.
It’s unlikely that a lot of these pages will have an existing internal link opportunity already on the page. That’s not to say we can’t use them, we can easily go into the page and edit the content naturally to create one.
Example: https://www.madesimplemedia.co.uk/web-design was the 3rd highest linked to page on the site. As a result, we logged into that specific page and updated the first paragraph to include a link to the page we’re trying to rank, which in this case was the homepage.
You can see the link we added below.
In total, we added 4 internal links from 4 different pages. There is no need to go overboard with this, like anything in SEO, you’ll see better results by focusing on quality and not quantity.
Step 3 – Resubmit the sitemap to Google once you’ve made all the changes.
2 weeks into the campaign and MadeSimpleMedia was up 61 positions across the board.
Not bad if I say so myself.
What’s better is that the client messaged me 2 weeks into the campaign to let me know that he has already received an inbound enquiry from a company based in Horsham.
Fast forward to June and we’ve carried out a custom link building plan and we’re now in position 1 for the Horsham based keywords. We’ve recently allocated our resources to the West Sussex page so watch this space.
I hope this highlights how powerful internal linking can be and gives you a reason to include it in your SOPs. If you ever want to view a website that has perfect internal links then check out the business blog website by Business Cobra, they’re onpage SEO is literally perfect. However, if you’re a local business owner and would like help optimising your internal links, feel free to get in touch with us today and we’ll be more than happy to help.
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