The List of Worst SEO Advice Ever

The most important part of being a digital marketer is to be open to learning new SEO strategies every day. As a newbie, we tend to listen to people whom we think are SEO experts and people who are highly experienced in this field, but I have realized it the hard way that not all advice is good advice.

I have listed a list of the worst SEO advice I have ever received;

Bad Advice: Only Creating Quality Content Matters

The first advice and the one I have most heard about from all the SEO experts is that writing as much as quality content is the only way to get success.

True Advice: Creating Content Relevant to What Users Care About is More Important

If you keep on creating 1000 blog posts which are of high quality, will you be a success? Not really, instead if you can create a 100 blog posts which your users are interested in reading, then you will start seeing success. It does not matter how many posts you create, quality is important but it is not what will rank you higher. Writing content which the users do not care about is going to result in a high bounce rate. Your content will only succeed if it is what your users want to read.

Bad Advice: Content is the King

Another advice I have received every time is that I should spend most of my time creating new content to be consistent and attract more users.

True Advice: Promoting Existing Content is More Important than Creating New

If you have been following this advice and focussing on creating hundreds of blog posts to make sure that you are on the first page of Google, it will hardly matter. In fact, try writing a couple of good posts and observe through website analytics how it performs, you will be surprised to see not much changes in traffic and conversions. Creating content without doing the SEO technicalities will not help your content to rank. Make sure to be an expert in SEO or hire someone to do it for you.

The important step is to promote your content as much as you can. In fact, stick to one article per week and focus on promoting it. The policy should be 80% promoting and 20% writing. Content is not the real king, promotion is.

Bad Advice: Do Some Guest Blogging or Comment on Random Blogs

This was one such advice which I received from an SEO expert in the very first month of me becoming a digital marketer, “if you want your content to rank higher and more users reading it, you need to leave your site links all over the internet to get good backlinks”.

True Advice: Only Relevant and High-Quality Backlink Works

Backlinks can be great but doing it the wrong way will only damage your reputation. Leaving random links in the comment section of the blogs is considered spamming if it is not really relevant to the topic. The same thing is applied when you guest post and leave irrelevant backlinks which can be easily identified by Google algorithm and you will not really get any benefits out of it. Backlinks only work great when you leave links in high-quality websites and only the ones which are relevant to your niche and will help the readers to gather more information.

Bad Advice: Add All Keywords to the Image Tags

I was told by a long-time digital marketer that I should add all the keyword combinations to the images on my site, even if it does not make much sense, to help my site rank higher.

True Advice: Keep the Description Relevant to the Image

Now, let me explain this in detail. When your website is being crawled by a search engine, it cannot read your images hence adding Alt-text is important as it would be read instead by the search engine to establish relevance with the article. Now you must be aware that search engines can penalize a site for overstuffing keywords in the content, the same is applicable when you overstuff keywords in the images. That does not mean you should not use keywords in images, just use it as much as it is needed and do not overdo it.

The main purpose of Alt-text is to add a relevant description to your image. Something it is used to understand what exactly the image means when the image does not load due to browser error. When you write Alt-text, think of it as you are really writing it for people with a visual impairment who are using screen readers to read the Alt-text of the images. This will help you describe the image exactly the way it is.

Bad Advice: Link Building can lead to Penalization

The latest SEO advice which I received by a very experienced SEO expert is that Google is out there to penalize sites which engage in too much of link building hence better avoid engaging in such practices.

True Advice: Relevant Link Building is Good for SEO

Well, I agree to the fact that irrelevant and paid link building is a bad practice which Google will figure out eventually, but building high-quality relevant links can actually improve your site ranking as it will drive traffic from that link to your site which will mean to the search engine that people are finding your content useful.

So, what is the Worst Advice You Have Ever Heard?

Well, we have made it clear that no shortcuts will work when it comes to improving your website ranking. Only a long-term consistent strategy will take your rankings on the top of the cascade.

So, have you been doing any of these SEO mistakes? Share with us the worst SEO advice you have heard!!!