Whether promoting a personal blog or your startup’s website, if you are a student, chances are that you don’t have a large budget to invest in marketing. That’s where search engine optimization really comes in handy. First of all, it can be done on your own, which makes up for the lack of human resources.
Secondly, SEO can be a very cheap or even free method of promotion, which makes up for the lack of budget. At the same time, the profit is huge. According to Profitworks, SEO has a 275% ROI, which means you can earn $2.75 for every dollar spent on SEO. So, the benefits are clear. But how do you handle SEO the right way as a student?
First of all, you should ensure that you have enough time for SEO activities. As a student, you might want to use the EssayPro service to have all your academic tasks handled by professional writers. This way, you will have more time to promote your website or blog without risks to your academic performance. And secondly, you need to know what tactics to avoid when doing SEO. Read on to learn about the top five of them!
Keyword Abuse
There is no secret that filling your site with the right relevant keywords is one of the main ways to improve its positioning in search engines. This is the basic SEO concept that everyone knows about. But not everyone knows that keyword abuse is potentially dangerous to your website.
For beginners, it often feels like stuffing more keywords is a good way to get their content noticed. But the truth is that involving this tactic in your marketing strategy is a sure way to lower your ranking. Not so long ago, Google indeed tracked keyword density as proof of a website’s relevance to a specific search term. So, higher density was better. But this doesn’t work anymore. Today, higher keyword density indicates a lower quality of content and sends you to the bottom of SERPs. So, keyword abuse is something you want to avoid.
SEO Over Quality
Another mistake often made by beginners is focusing too much on optimization and not enough on the quality of content. A few years ago, the SEO techniques used on a website were the primary factors evaluated by search engines before assigning it a specific ranking. But times have changed, and search engines’ algorithms got smarter. So, now, they are crawling for quality, not for SEO.
Thus, the next thing you should really avoid is putting SEO over the quality of content you deliver. This can span a variety of methods. Namely, some common tactics that indicate that you value SEO more than content include:
- Publishing duplicate content;
- Article spinning;
- Keyword stuffing.
If you want to keep your SEO metrics above average, you should forget about all the aforementioned techniques. Instead, focus on creating relevant, valuable, and unique content. Make your audience happy, and it will do much more for your ranking than such tricks.
Spamming
Spamming of any kind is one of the basics of black hat SEO. It has long been proven to cause lots of harm to websites, from lowering their positions in SERPs to receiving Google penalties. So, this is one more thing you want to avoid.
This includes:
Link spamming - Adding a ridiculous number of links that bring no real value;
Guest post spamming - Posting too many guest posts on other people’s websites and publishing too many guest articles on yours;
Comment spamming - Posting lots of off-topic comments with links or keywords.
All these spamming techniques might give you a boost in traffic. But it will only be temporary. After that, the quality of your SEO will drop significantly, and restoring it will be a real challenge. Remember that search engines are smart enough to trace all sorts of spam-based tactics and will respond to them accordingly, so there is no sense in trying to trick them.
Swapping or Buying Backlinks
Backlinks are incredibly important for your website’s SEO. They let search engines know that your content is recognized and approved by other people on the web. As a result, a solid backlink-building strategy can add credibility and improve your ranking. But it needs to be handled the right way.
While some backlinks can bring you to the top, others can actually harm you. The first category includes links from authoritative and popular sites. These can only be obtained through organic tactics and lots of hard work. To be more specific, the only way to get your links posted on high-authority sites is to create top-quality guest content.
On the other hand, there is a faster, easier, and seemingly more effective tactic for acquiring backlinks - you can simply swap (ask websites to post your links and do the same for them in exchange) or buy them. Needless to say, such opportunities are mostly offered by low-quality sites that don’t receive much trust from search engines. As a result, having your links posted on such websites will lower your rating as well. So, buying or swapping links is never a good idea.
Relying Too Much on Redirecting
Redirecting is a popular SEO tactic. It implies redirecting users from a link they wanted to use to someplace that you want to navigate them to. On the one hand, this tactic is proven to be quite effective. Even though it interferes with a user’s initial intent, there are cases when using this technique is acceptable. However, there are no valid reasons for misusing redirects.
First of all, you should avoid redirecting when it’s completely off-topic. For example, a user was reading a guide on writing marketing content, clicks on the link related to the topic to learn more, and suddenly finds him or herself on your pricing page where you sell some products or services not even related to marketing. That’s not the best practice.
Fooling search engines is not an option either. Some black hat SEO marketers use redirecting to send search engines to one page and real users to another. This ill-conceived cloaking scheme never brings positive results. Even if you manage to fool the algorithms once or twice, they are getting smarter and will definitely recognize this, which can lead to penalties. Same way, redirecting a page with a high ranking to the one with a low ranking to boost the latter one’s position is also a bad idea.
All in all, you have to remember that fooling search engines and users into visiting pages without intending to do so is a violation of Google’s terms of service. It might boost your traffic temporarily. But, eventually, it will be harshly penalized.
The Bottom Line
Getting your student blog or website higher in search results is a complicated and ongoing process that requires lots of attention. But it can get so much easier when you know which tactics are trending and which don’t work anymore.
The approaches we shared with you here are all outdated and irrelevant these days. Using them as a part of your strategy is proven to cause more harm than good. So, now you know exactly what to avoid. Use this as your guide to successful SEO. Good luck!