If you are one of the many people who are trying to grow their online presence, you may already know about the power of search engine optimization, also known as SEO.
If you don’t, you should be aware that SEO is one of the primary ways to direct online traffic to your websites and social media pages by making them easier to find on search engines. While you may know these basics, there are more specifics to know about SEO than the average online businessperson knows.
Knowing how to properly use SEO for your business, products, or services can make or break the amount of web traffic that you will receive. If you use SEO improperly, you can confuse search engines and end up being less visible online than you were before.
This means that when you are learning how to implement SEO, you need to know what to do and what to avoid when adding keywords to your website or social media pages.
In this article, we will discuss the dos and don’ts of SEO to teach you how to be an SEO pro without a costly and unnecessary degree in digital marketing.
- DO add keywords that are relevant.
Adding keywords to your content that are relevant to your content is the best way to properly implement SEO on your website. By adding keywords that make sense for your content, you will be able to promote growth. Your keywords must be relevant to your content.
Those that add non-relevant keywords to their content are known as “keyword stuffers”. Keyword stuffing is considered a shady practice and can mean that your intended customers will click away because they will likely be dissatisfied with your use of irrelevant keywords.
Instead, ensure that your keywords are relevant to promote honest and organic website traffic. You will gain traffic that is then supposed to be on your website and will result in higher conversion rates.
- Don’t add keywords unnaturally.
You must avoid using your keywords too often in your content or using keywords where they do not fit naturally into sentences. For example, you may be tempted to use your keywords as many times as you possibly can, but they may not fit in naturally to the way your content is formatted.
This is another way that you can lose trust with prospective customers. As well, by using keywords unnaturally you may telegraph to your audience by accident that you may not care about the quality of your content, as it will make your content look like it may not have been proofread.
Rather than using keywords inappropriately, use them as they come up naturally in your content to rank well on search engine result pages!
- DO have useful and good content.
Google and other search engines are now prioritizing websites that offer their website visitors with good and useful content rather than having just optimized keywords alone. For example, if your webpage promises to answer a specific question for your visitors and the keywords suggest that you will give your visitors the answers to this question.
However, if visitors click away too quickly to fully read the article and do not continue to engage with your webpage, the search engine algorithms will likely decide that your content was not useful or relevant to the question and you will lose rank as a result.
Instead, supply your visitors with quality content and you will be more likely to convert visitors to customers!
- Don’t make significant changes at the same time.
If you have a website, you will know that making changes to your website can make or break your site. You may find that you have some aspects of your website that work really well and you may find that you have others that do not work well at all.
We advise against making very large and significant changes to your website all at once because you can accidentally eliminate the parts of your website that work really well for you and your customers.
Try to focus on small and measurable changes so that you can see whether the work you have done is working for you or not when adding SEO to your website.
- DO add keywords to your website navigation.
Adding SEO to your online content is more than just adding keywords to blog posts and product descriptions. One of the most easily forgotten aspects of search engine optimization in digital marketing is adding SEO to website navigation.
Think about it this way, you have arrived on a website to shop for a very specific product because you specifically searched for that product. If there are labels on a website that are vague or confusing, you might completely miss the page where you can go to in order to buy that product.
This is a very real risk that you take when optimizing some, but not all of your online web content. You also run the risk of people getting frustrated and choosing to visit another website in order to find what they are looking for.
Consider adding keywords to your website navigation to improve the user experience on your website.
Conclusion and Takeaway
All in all, when implementing SEO into your digital marketing strategy, you need to keep in mind that people hate wasting their time by encountering things that they may not be trying to look for.
When people search for a specific search term they are either looking for a product, service, or explanation that fits what they are looking for. Don’t overcomplicate it and frustrate your potential customers by falling into common SEO traps like keyword stuffing or adding irrelevant keywords to your web pages.
Do add the proper keywords to your content in order to rise up the ranks on search engine result pages.
We hope that these dos and don’ts of SEO will help you to ensure that you are using best practices while implementing keywords into your online content!
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