4 Bad SEO Tactics That Will No Longer Continue in 2022

Is your website struggling to rank well on Google despite following all the SEO best practices you can find on the internet?

Well, it must be because you’re still executing techniques that you shouldn’t be doing in the first place!  

We don't blame you. There is a lot of misinformation circling the web, and you probably didn't know that some of the SEO in West Palm Beach tactics you’ve been doing no longer work or are considered as bad.  

What’s important is that you’re here, and you’re here to learn.  

In this article, we are going to discuss the four SEO tactics that will no longer continue in 2022.  

Without any more delays, let's get started:

What Could Be Limiting Your SEO Success?

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is using a keyword and variations of it as many times possible on a page or content to try and manipulate a site’s ranking in the search results for that particular term.  

Keyword stuffing isn’t anything new. It’s been around for quite some time, and we believe that many websites are still guilty of doing this.  

At one point in the past, it worked - when Google’s algorithm was much simpler and easier to manipulate, but that’s no longer true today.  

Google is so much smarter now. And, that’s good news because you no longer have to stuff keywords just to get your website to rank.

What you need to focus on this 2022 is providing your audience value by creating content that covers a keyword topic and all of the related sub-topics, ideas, and context around it.  

This way, you’re already providing answers to questions your audience hasn’t even asked or thought of.  

Another thing to pay attention to is targeting long-tail, conversational keywords.  

Voice search is going to be big this 2022, so make sure that your result ranks high for relevant voice queries by including keywords that people will likely use when they're casually asking someone to help them find what they're looking for.  

For example, instead of using “thrift store in West Palm Beach”, you should go for “where can I find a thrift store near me?”.  

Poorly Designed Website

Having a bespoke website for your business is extremely important because it gives you the opportunity to create a good and lasting impression on your potential customers.  

A professionally designed and well-optimized website also helps improve the user experience, which motivates users to stay longer and increases your conversions.  

However, it can get expensive, which is why DIY website builders are so attractive to many small business owners.  

Although website builders can help you create a site more affordably, they come with limitations which can affect your website’s performance, especially when you do scale to accommodate more pages, features, and whatnot.

Some of those limitations include:

• Limited mobile optimization: You can’t do any customization and are limited only to their built-in mobile rendering. How bad can it seriously get, you ask? This could mean that your content and design will not look good or function well on mobile devices and it loads slow, resulting in a poor user experience.  

• Rarely looks exactly like the preview: Sure, cookie-cutter websites are cool because you already know how they’re supposed to look after you’ve put your content in place. But, in reality, once you publish, it rarely looks exactly how you intended it to be.  
• Easy to use at first: Many people are drawn to use website builders because of their drag-and-drop features. However, the moment you start customizing pages, resizing images, and delve deeper into links, it’s a whole different story. You can’t exactly do what you want and are limited to what the builder will allow you to do.  
• Generic-looking websites: Given how competitive the business landscape is today, you must differentiate yourself from your competitors no matter what industry you’re in. A cookie-cutter template isn’t how you can achieve that.  
• Lack of SEO optimization and lead generation elements: Website builders don't really design their templates with SEO or lead generation in mind. In other words, SEO is only an afterthought to website builders. You can’t expect your website to rank well if you’re going to use cookie-cutter templates from website builders.  
• E-commerce features are limited: You can’t buy and sell products directly from your website because website builder platforms don’t offer this feature.  

This 2022, consider hiring a firm that specializes in website designs and has SEO in West Palm Beach experts on staff. Professionals know what they’re doing and can help create the ideal website for your business that will not only provide a positive experience to its users, but also put you on top of the search results.

Sneaking Unnatural Links

Backlinks are like trust signals that tell Google you’re a credible source of information and that your website possesses valuable content. This helps increase your ranking and drive more traffic to your site.  

However, earning backlinks isn’t easy, which is why some people add unnatural links and hide them throughout their site to try and trick search engines into ranking their site higher.  

Then again, this tactic no longer works and is often penalized when caught.  

Over the years, people have gotten really creative at doing this by hiding them in plain sight by using a white font color on a white background, adding them to the widget creator, incorporating them into WordPress theme links, placing them in the footer, link trading, and many more.  

If you’re still doing this, please stop it. It could be the reason why your site isn’t ranking well on Google.  

There are many ways you can earn backlinks, including the following:

• Check the websites that are already linking back to you and citing you as a source.  
• Send an outreach email to high authority websites you’re linking and sending a lot of traffic to and see if they’d be willing to form a partnership.  

• Use Google Search Console reports accessing data you can use to earn backlinks.  
• Check where your competitors are getting their backlinks from.  
• Publish high-quality content that will naturally attract backlinks.  
• Create content that covers all aspects of a topic in detail that your ideal customers are interested in knowing more about.  
• Create infographics to generate backlinks to your site.

• Write testimonials for other companies you've worked within the past.  
• Get high-quality backlinks through HARO (Help a Reporter Out).
• Write for other blogs or websites.  
• Appear as a guest on any podcasts.
• Be active in different forums.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to any form of content that appears on the web in more than one place or has been copied from somewhere else.  

The bad thing about duplicate content is that it confuses Google bots and forces them to choose which of the identical pages they should position in the top results.  

Having duplicate content could get your key pages to end up not getting ranked at all, which is yet another possible reason why you’re not ranking well on Google.

There are also instances when people commit duplicate content without realizing it. Here are two of those instances:

• Copy and paste the same product descriptions from one page to another, resulting in the wrong version of pages showing in SERPs.  
• Exact content shows up multiple times throughout your site. This often results in your key pages not performing well in SERPs because your credit gets split and spread across different pages.

You can avoid duplicate content using these steps:

• Use canonical tags to signal Google which page on your site is the original
• Add ‘no index’ meta robots tag to the HTML code of your page to tell Google that it should exclude the duplicate pages from the SERPs.  

• Use parameter handling to demonstrate how search engine bots should crawl your sites effectively and avoid pages that should not be crawled.  
• If possible, use 301 redirects to get rid of duplicate content.  

Take Your Business to the Next Level with SEO in West Palm Beach

If you still continue to stuff keywords in your content, have a poorly designed website, sneak unnatural links in your pages, or are using duplicate content, it’s time to stop. Any of these could be the reason why you’re not ranking well on the SERPs, and they’ll make it harder for your website to perform well this 2022.

If you used to follow them in the past but have since stopped, yet you’re still struggling to do well in the search results, your best bet is to hire a professional to do a full SEO scan. There could be some technical SEO issues that haven't been resolved yet, or  perhaps, penalties you weren't aware of.  

At Digital Resource, we offer a FREE SEO scan to help you assess how well your website is doing compared to your competitors. Our team of SEO experts can also do a comprehensive assessment of your SEO and identify what you should improve to boost your rankings and achieve SEO success!  

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