Are you sitting at that exciting point between advertising campaigns? Whether you are new to the world of SEO or consider yourself to be an old hand, one thing is for sure: no two campaigns are the same. Not when the world of SEO changes as readily as it does right now.
This means that there are always lessons to learn and new techniques to master. You don’t need to be bored when caught between an SEO campaign.
With that said, let’s take a look now at the core SEO traits that could harm your next campaign and how to avoid them.
Key Things to Avoid in Your Next SEO Campaign
Everybody wants to have the best SEO practices powering their site. After all, the better your SEO platform, the greater the likelihood of success for any given campaign.
To make sure you are getting the most out of your SEO campaign, look out for the following pitfalls.
Short Content Does Cut the Mustard
Sure, the right ratio of keywords to text is crucial for SEO success, but doing so on a piece that is only short, isn’t going to yield the results you expect.
What is too short?
Well, posts should be at least 500 words and vary given the subject matter. While you don’t want to add words just for the sake of it, you will want to have plenty of 1500 – 2000 word posts on your site.
Solid Blocks of Text Just Don’t Work
This one can creep up on you, because, when you talk about an SEO campaign, you are thinking about words; keywords and ratios. However, another key part is page view time. Make sure that the people who click on your material stay there and devour it.
You don’t get that with just a wall of text.
No matter how short your make your paragraphs.
What you want to add are plenty of images, and maybe even some GIFs – depending on the style of the site and nature of the content you create.
Understanding How the Algorithm Bots Work
While it may not be directly linked to the basics of your SEO campaign, knowing how the bots work is crucial to success.
Why you may ask. Well, that is because the Google bots do not care about how flashy your site looks. Sure, it is important to have a good design, that holds peoples attention, but HTML is where it is all at.
The content and the meta data in the code are what the bots read. They don’t talk flash or anything else. While that’s good to have, you need to make sure you are paying the right level of attention to your HTML.
Know Your Audience and Their Terminology
What is SEO? It is the use of certain key words and key terms that will drive traffic to your site.
In order to maximize the effect of any SEO campaign, you need to make sure you are focusing on the correct audience.
This can vary from post to post, but you do want to make sure that you know your audience. Understand the way they talk, and the way they think. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they would search for.
When you know your audience and the terms they use, then you can really make the most of your SEO and drive active traffic to your site. You want people who want to be there, find the content interesting, and maybe click around and see what else you have to offer.
Weigh Up Your Anchor Links
Another key point to a successful SEO campaign is to make sure you have the correct balance of keywords in your internal links and images. This is a simple one, and is basically about avoiding keyword spamming, and linking to pages just because of the keyword, or using a keyword heavy anchor text for a link that is unrelated.
There is no harm in using keywords in your links, you just need to ensure that you use them sparingly and accurately.
Make Sure You Look Outside
While a successful SEO campaign will see people explore your site, drawn further by the content you are creating, you don’t want to be too selfish with your links. You have to make sure that there are outward facing links also.
Whether you are linking to useful information that runs parallel to your post, or maybe even just citing a source for your statistics, outbound links are becoming a crucial part of any SEO strategy.
Not only that, but you need to make sure your external links are pointing to high-quality sites which themselves have a good rank and content level.
Make Use of Long Tail Keywords
Not too long ago, you could base a good campaign around a few choice keywords. Single words that are searched often and can be used to drive people to your site.
Nowadays, things are a little more complex. Google is getting smarter, and single words are no longer working. What you need to use are long-tail keywords. These are phrases or short sentences that people are likely to type into Google.
The end result is the same, traffic is driven to your site, but the longer keywords mean the traffic you do get is even more likely to be the traffic you need to make your site a success.
Ensure Your Next Campaign Hits the Mark
At the end of the day, a successful SEO campaign lies in your hands. Sure there are bots and algorithms to bear in mind, but they are nothing that can’t be worked with.
If you are unsure about how to do this or don’t feel as if you can deliver the best that your business needs, then why not let us help you?
Check out some of our free SEO videos, and learn how to give your SEO that extra push.
With our range of SEO analytic tools, we can help equip you with everything you will need to turn your next SEO campaign into the best one you’ve ever had.