Whether you are a professional SEO services provider or a small business website owner, it is likely that you spend each day fighting against the clock in order to complete everything that you think will help a website to surge up the search rankings.
However, a lot of the time, website owners and less-experienced SEOs do not realize that what they are doing is counterproductive. What are the things that you should no longer be doing, which, if you are, will free up an awful lot of your time almost as soon as you stop?
Daily Traffic Checks
We can definitely understand why a business owner would want to spend time checking their website traffic. After all, if you have no traffic, you have no business.
The only trouble with this is that traffic does not actually mean anything. What percentage of this traffic are you converting into customers? How are browsers behaving when they find your site? Have you paid for an SEO campaign but the traffic is not coming from organic search?
These are all far more pressing and relevant questions to ask yourself, and ones where the answers can lead to action. If you are checking traffic to the point of obsession, it is time to stop.
Keyword Density Checks
Some people are still out there using complex calculations in order to ensure that their keyword density is correct. How does the individual density of words measure up with long-tail keyword phrases? Should I take a sentence from this paragraph so the keywords are more prominent?
Keyword density is only a useful measure in terms of we know that you need it in there to show Google what you are writing about, and that too much usage will see you potentially penalized. Keyword density is easy to achieve naturally. If you are writing about a specific product or service and aiming to produce quality content, the keywords will fit in where they need to, and not seem obvious or forced.
Article Spinning
Content is king, so you probably think that means the more you have, the better your rankings will be. True, but only if every piece of content is high quality. Taking the same article and spinning it, either manually or using software, is not worth your time and effort. Far better to spend the time coming up with unique, quality articles that you can go to a blogger or website with and proudly say ‘this excellent piece of writing is yours in return for a link.’
Article spinning can be tempting in order to produce fresh content for our own blog or guest posting campaign, but it will not achieve anything.
Obsessing Over Rankings
If you are carrying out a quality SEO campaign, have a good content marketing plan, and are using social media to best effect, then the traffic will come to your website.
Why waste time worrying about where you are ranking, when you probably know that it could take weeks or months for something you do today to take effect? If you use Google to mine for data and check rankings too much, they will also penalize you. Why risk it?
If any of these techniques are taking up any of your day, it is time to throw them away for good. Instead, focus on your business and the factors that will improve SEO and site performance, and where you can really make a difference, rather than fretting over that which you cannot control or ensure high quality.
Author Bio: This guest post was written by Bright Local who provide the best SEO tools to local business looking to improve their web presence.
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