Business owners looking to generate more traffic have a couple ways to achieve this. We feel the best way to accomplish this task is via SEO.

Not only will you build traffic to your website via the search engines, but you’ll also achieve authority status in your niche.

Your customers will recognize the value and experience that you bring to the table because of your incredible content and all of the insightful things that you share with them.

Unfortunately, if you’re planning to implement a search engine optimization strategy on your own, you’ve got options. You can figure it out on your own, hire an agency like FullScale SEO or use productized services like the guest posting service offered by OutreachMama. Otherwise you could end up following terrible advice that teaches you the wrong SEO tactics that will end up causing more harm than good.

To help you avoid making foolish mistakes, we will share three terrible search engine optimization tactics that could cause serious damage to your business.

Please avoid these tactics like the plague.

  1. Keyword Stuffing Your Content

As a business owner, it’s your job to keep keyword stuffing in your content to a minimum. Or if you are an SEO agency, and your customer wants you to stuff the heck out of their content, do your best to keep them on a short leash.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content read terribly, it’s also a signal to the search engines that you are trying to manipulate their rankings.

Instead of having the positive, powerful effect you hope to achieve, you’ll end up putting yourself in the sandbox by harming your rankings instead.

When you create good content and share it via social media channels and other options, people will naturally gravitate toward it and happily link back to it. This is the only way to create high-quality content for backlinking purposes.

According to Ajay Paghdal from Youth Noise, the best SEO Kansas City has to offer, “… It’s all about creating content that your customers care about.”

So, forget about stuffing your content with keywords. if you are promoting a webpage and keyword like this, apartments in Sunnyvale CA, you don’t need to mention it 20 times without fear of annoying your readers and  getting Google on your tail.

Create high-value content that your customers want to read. You’ll comply with Google’s wishes and create value in your market. This is certainly content that people would gladly link to as you’ll soon see.

  1. Keyword Stuffing Title Tags and Meta-Descriptions

Again, just like we mentioned about your content, there’s no real value in keyword stuffing meta-descriptions and title tags at this point.

In the past, this was a high-value SEO tactic.

You could create completely garbage content and stuff keywords in your title tags and meta-descriptions and it would rank number one for some powerful keywords with massive traffic.

Guess what? Google is a lot smarter than they were back in the early 2000’s. And their search engine algorithms are much more sophisticated.

So drop these old-school black hat SEO methods that used to rank.

They don’t work anymore and they’ll never work again.

The only thing they’ll ever do is work against you and create lost rankings and Google penalties that you would much rather avoid.

  1. Posting Duplicate Content

As far as the search engines go, you’re never going to get high search rankings if you are posting duplicate content.

I understand that it’s a lot easier to create one piece of content and share it in many places.

Doing this is going to not only kill all of its SEO value, but if you post this info on your website and Google crawls it, they will ultimately end up giving you penalties that are hard to overcome.

So stop posting duplicate content on your blog or website. You’re doing more harm than good and ultimately hurting your rankings in the process.

Conclusion

If you plan to attempt search engine optimization for the first time, please avoid these three terrible tactics like your life depends on it.

Author Bio

Pat Sava
Pat Sava is a super-connector who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, and networking. He frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing and focuses his efforts on developing customized blogger outreach plans depending on the industry and competition.