With a new year comes new beginnings. When it comes to owning a website, this is a great time to build new habits, especially when it comes to SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a large part of any site and is one of the biggest ranking factors for your site. If your SEO is not up to par, you can be penalized heavily by Google, which could cost you sales.
Since SEO is an ever-changing market, you have to stay up to date with the latest trends to ensure your site stays in good graces with Google. Today, we are going to look at 5 things not to do when it comes to technical SEO in 2020.
Backlinks are one of the best things that you can do for your site as Google sees this as high-quality signals for a site. While many people tend to try to get as many links as they can without worrying about quality, they tend to build many low-quality links. While this can help, spending the time to create content that can be used for higher quality links, can save time and get better results.
Content is king, no matter who says it's not. Whether it is product descriptions, blogs, or installation instructions, content is always good to have so that it adds to your overall site. Google will crawl this information and it is more content for users to potentially land on if it is worded correctly. Make a schedule and stick to it, even if you have to outsource your content creation.
When you have a website, you are going to need content for better user experience and for Google's crawlers to crawl your site and see what your site is about. Building content continuously will only help your site, as long as you do not produce duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs when you have two pages with identical content. This is frowned upon by Google and can be a basis of penalization in some cases.
When you are creating your content, make sure that you do the proper keyword research. This will help your content rank better and make sure you are delivering content that people actually search for. While you may think you know your niche and what kind of content your target market likes, the data doesn't lie. Find a good keyword research tool that provides search volume for each keyword and figure out how you can make content based on these keywords.
Last but not least, make sure that you do not fall behind on the latest technical SEO standards and trends. This is a common problem for website owners and not making a necessary change can result in serious rank loss or even worse - a Google penalty.