With any website, SEO is important to achieving a noticeable online presence. There are many different techniques for website owners and eCommerce merchants to use to try to boost their SEO and have a greater presence on search engines.

As technology advances and progresses, techniques to making a greater impact on search engines can become stale and outdated.

At Genius eCommerce, we keep you informed on all the latest trends, tips and tricks to achieving better results in the digital space. Today, we’ll inform you on a few things not to do with your SEO efforts.

Keyword Stuffing and Density – Producing content for your website is no longer as simple as just writing a bunch of posts specifically targeting keywords or overloading your content with one keyword. Keyword density and keyword stuffing are tactics that no longer work with Google’s system. Keywords remain an important part of SEO, but instead of trying to insert a specific keyword a number of times into content and trying to load up web pages with keywords, content quality is more important, meaning you need to have well-constructed and well-thought content to really make an impact on search engines.

Writing for Search Engines – This is also known as writing for robots. Again, it’s the quality of your content that is more important. Don’t use some writing robot to construct content that is unnatural. Taking a keyword and writing it in all variations in your content isn’t going to work with search engines. Give your content a human element; write like a human for humans. This will certainly increase the quality of your writing and give you a better chance to make an impact with search engines.

Link Buying – Years ago, it was fairly routine to see offers and deals to purchase more links to point to your website and many website owners would do it. Even all this time later, there are still people who pay to have more links point to their website. The problem with this tactic is that buying links and taking shortcuts does not achieve any success. Google can easily identify a low-quality website that will be carrying a purchased link. If you want to really generate more buzz on search engines and build up links, you have to earn them.

Poor Keyword Research Strategies – There are many different categories and data that can be reviewed when it comes to researching keywords. Many people try to use tools like Google’s free Keyword Planner to try to replicate keyword data. Some of the features and reports from their tools is not an accurate representation of the industry, the competition and the overall market for your business. The best way to do that is for a business owner to get their own evaluation and understanding of these areas and build a strategy based on that.

Exact Match – The practice of targeting for exact matches of keywords and search queries just for the traffic is another tactic that is doomed to fail. Google is smart enough as a search engine to determine if there is a relevance between the business and search term and thwart any chances that a keyword displays for an exact match just to increase click-through rates. Similarly, having keywords of greater value in your URL makes some sense, but isn’t foolproof. Keep your domains consistent with your brand and instead of trying to attract other keywords just to build traffic.

Now that you know how some of these practices can hurt your SEO efforts, consider these tips and stay informed on the best practices from great content to an effective and well-researched keyword list that can help you get better SEO results.

With Genius eCommerce, we are your source for the latest tips, tricks, trends, and updates in the eCommerce space. This is who we are and what we do! Continue reading the Genius eCommerce blog for more updates.