What Not to Do: Pittsburgh SEO Part 2

In the first installment of What Not to Do: Pittsburgh SEO, we discussed two of the cheap, business-damaging tactics which unscrupulous SEO companies tend to use. We covered high-volume, low-quality backlink purchases and mass, haphazard content syndication. Even at their best, these tactics are a waste of time and money. At their worst, they are a surefire way to get search engines to bury or even ban your website. Since it’s so critical to recognize these dangerous practices, here are three more Pittsburgh SEO strategies to avoid. 3.) Keyword Tricks For web surfers and search algorithms alike, internet surfing is all about keywords. For your site’s pages to rank well and attract readers for a given phrase, that phrase needs to be the focus. Unfortunately, many SEO firms take this focus way too far. One dangerous trick is called “stuffing,” whereby content writers will place a keyword in an extremely high volume throughout an article. Not only does such a high keyword density read unnaturally and turn away readers, the search engines have created effective programs to spot and penalize it. Another trick some SEO companies use is to place invisible keywords on a page. They do this hoping to attract search engine bots without alienating consumers with stuffed content. However, Google and other engines have developed powerful applications to spot this deception, and they will severely penalize websites that engage in it. 4.) Spam Junk email from dubious senders isn’t the only type of spam. Even when the sender is a legitimate businessperson, useless emails can be flagged, as well. For instance, sending your emails to a questionably-obtained list of non-consenting people is spam. It doesn’t matter that you’re making a sincere offer. What’s important is that the recipients never agreed to receive your message. Another common type of spam is useless commenting on blogs and forums. Oftentimes, SEO companies will engage in blog-commenting or forum-posting “campaigns” in which they simply submit as many of your links as possible without saying anything of value to other readers. If the readers report your site as spam, search engines may very well remove it from their index. This can happen even if you didn’t know that the Pittsburgh SEO firm you contracted was doing anything unethical. 5.) Junk Content Quality content is gold in Google’s eyes, but it’s also very expensive and time-consuming to produce and syndicate. To avoid a large investment, some SEO firms have taken to producing seriously inferior articles and blogs by hiring foreign writers who will work for pennies. These writers typically have very poor English skills and produce prose which is nearly unreadable. This type of content kills your chances at establishing a readership and making sales. Even worse, some SEO companies will actually steal content from the web and run it through a “spinning” program to make it look unique to the search engines. Not only does this constitute plagiarism and copyright infringement, it produces ungrammatical, horrible content which readers and search engine bots alike will recognize as phony. Overall, you need to make sure the company you hire is not using these tactics and putting your business at risk. If you want to learn more about quality SEO and see how your business ranks among the competition, use the links below for a free, confidential consultation. You’ve got nothing to lose and so much to gain from our professional Pittsburgh SEO services.

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