When it comes to SEO, it’s imperative that site owners understand the difference between being efficient and taking a shortcut. You have to be efficient and organized in order to keep all the wheels turning, but taking shortcuts is actually going to undermine your efforts in the long run, hurting your SEO and costing you a lot more in terms of time and money when all is said and done.
Here are 3 SEO shortcuts that almost always come back to haunt you in the end:
1. Cheap link building campaigns.
If you’ve done any research into creating a link building campaign you’ve undoubtedly come across some offers like “500 links for only $49.95!” or “Build 100 links overnight!” or “Link building campaign guaranteed to work!” We’ve all seen them time and time again—no matter how many times I or other white hat SEO practitioners warn against these cheap link building campaigns, site owners with tight budgets and short-term goals fall for them. While it may look good to say you built 500 links in a month for pennies a link, chances are those links are essentially valueless in terms of SEO. And that’s the best case scenario! The worst case is those links are actually going to hurt your website’s reputation and cause your site to be penalized.
When it comes to link building, slow and steady is the way to go; shortcuts are just going to take you down the wrong road. I’d much rather it take 6 months or even a year to build 500 links but have them all be quality links I know will help improve the trust factor of a site, than get 500 tomorrow that are going to bite me in the you-know-what a few months down the road. Believe me, if your site is penalized for unnatural link building you’ll have to do a lot more than just rebuild those links in order to recover!
2. $5 articles from India
I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase “Content is King” thrown around on dozens of SEO blogs. Well the reason it gets thrown around so much is because it’s true—but the phrase should really be “Quality, informational content is King.” I understand that budgets are tight and you may not have the resources to invest in a full time copywriter, but outsourcing your content marketing to India for $5 or $10 per piece of content is just a waste of what little budget you do have. Content is too important and too integral a component of your long term SEO success to take shortcuts with it. You need to be publishing content that is well-written, informed, and useful and speaks directly to your target audience, not just generic words on a page. It’s hard to get all of what for $5.
Content is what propels your SEO forward. It gets links, connects with your target audience, nurtures leads, gives the search engines a reason to revisit your site, and helps build your online authority and much more. Stale, flat, boring and bland content will get you none of those things and can actually hurt your reputation.
3. Free website templates
Your website is easily your most important piece of online real estate and the whole reason you’ve investing in SEO in the first place! You want to get more organic traffic to your site, right? Well getting visitors to your site is only half the battle. SEO is supposed to help drive traffic to your site, but what happens after that is up to your website and first impressions count. Most free website templates are nothing special, so what does that say about your brand? What kind of impression does your website give to a brand new visitor? Does it convey authority and expertise or does it look slapped together and poorly designed? The way your site looks impacts a customer’s perception of your brand. Most free website templates also aren’t all that customizable, so it’s very likely that your site looks exactly like dozens of other sites out there (maybe yours is blue-green instead of aquamarine, but that’s about it).
In addition to having a site that looks good, you need to have one that functions. A cheap website is much more likely to have coding errors, bugs and crash more frequently simply because the designer wasn’t getting paid enough to really hammer out all the kinks. The best SEO in the world can’t do much for your online business if your site’s shopping cart won’t process credit card payments correctly.
These are just three examples of how SEO shortcuts can come back to haunt you in the end. While it may seem like a good idea now, it’s important to remember that SEO is incredibly long term. What might seem like a quick fix to SEO success can actually endanger the long term value of your site and ultimately your online brand. Don’t let an SEO shortcut cost you more in the end!