Things to Avoid, some Tips!

Most website or blog owners want to have a site that is popular, gets a lot of site visitors, and is at the top of the search rankings in the major search engines. They want to be at the Apex of their Niche, so to speak.

If you want all of these things then there are many things that you can do wrong that can be harmful for your website or blog. We will tell you some tips and pointers that can help you reach the goal of reaching the Apex in your Niche without doing something wrong that can be harmful to your site.

First off lets talk about bad links. Website or blog owners who don’t know this, links to your site mean more site traffic as well as a boost in the search engine index thus helping you climb the ladder of the search results pages on your way to the top. If the years past a large number of links to your website gave it a big boost in the search results rankings and it didn’t really matter where those links came from. Well, those days are long gone.

Now, the search engines want to rank the sites that have high quality relevant links over those who have many more links of low quality. In the past many website or blog owners could buy links from link services and other places like fiverr.com and other similar websites. The search engines now consider this a bad method for building your site’s links and these type of links will harm your site’s search results rankings. So whatever you do, do NOT buy links for your website because this will only hurt your site.

The search engines want your site to get what they call “Natural” links to your site. These are links that you did not buy or seek out personally. Breaking it down for you is that basically natural links occur when you write good quality and original articles, stories, posts or whatever and a reader likes this content and so they create a link to your website or blog from their website, blog, social media or other profile.

This helps your site to develop what search engines call “Authority” and with this your website or blog will start to climb the search rankings. Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s web spam team writes “The objective is not to make your links look natural, the objective is that your links are natural”. So according to the search engines the bottom line to build natural quality links is that you want to create 100% original, high quality content and put it out for the world to see and people will link to your site naturally and that will help you climb the search engine’s ranking pages.

Another thing that some site owners do is to do what I call “Copy and Paste Writing”. This is when a person finds an article, story and other information on the internet and just highlights the text, hit’s the copy key/s and then goes and paste’s it to a post or page on their website or blog. This is NOT a good thing to do. The search engines will penalize your rankings because this is NOT original content that was written by the site owner.

Google defines duplicate content as “Substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” They see this as a way to manipulate the search rankings of your site or to win more traffic. So be sure to write your own content. You can still look for information that is out there on other sites but you want to gather the information and write your article, story, post or whatever yourself and in your own words.

Lastly, when you are writing content for your site, write it for the users / visitors to your site and not for the search engines. Write quality content that looks natural and is written so that it looks good to your site visitors. Many website or blog owners have a tendency to write for search engine rankings by using way to many key words that they want their content to rank for.

The search engines see this as “Spammy” content and not good quality content. When a search engine see’s an overuse of a keyword then your website or blog will start to slip further and further down the search engine’s rankings. Write content the same way you would want to read it and don’t repeat certain words to the point that those words seem to be everywhere.

Now there are many things you can do to harm the search rankings (SERP’s) of your website or blog but these listed above are some of the more frequent things that many site owners do that can only harm their site. Always try to create a good quality website or blog with original content and make the site is one that a visitor will like and want to return to in the future.

Build your site to be one that you would like to visit yourself if it wasn’t your own site. Avoid the bad practices listed above and that will help your website or blog gain authority and help it reach towards the Apex in its Niche.

Good Luck and may your website or blog reach the Apex in its Niche!