If you write a blog to promote your business, raise brand awareness, and boost word-of-mouth marketing, then you should know the five rules you should never break if you want to keep getting Google traffic to your content. These are the search engine optimization techniques that Google frowns upon.
If Google catches you breaking any of these rules, your business blog could be penalized with lower keyword search rankings. Even worse, your business blog could be banned from Google search results entirely. That would be disastrous to your business, so follow the rules listed below to watch your Google traffic continually rise rather than suddenly disappear.
1. Avoid Stuffing Keywords into Your Posts and Pages
Keyword stuffing is considered to be a spam technique used to artificially inflate Google search results rankings. That's because Google's algorithm considers the content on a page in order to identify the relevancy of those pages to keyword searches.
Don't overuse keywords on your business blog. Instead, always make sure your keywords sound natural in your blog posts. Take a few minutes to learn some tricks to use keywords in your blog posts safely.
2. Never Hide Keywords on Your Blog
Just as you shouldn't stuff keywords into a blog post, you shouldn't try to hide them on your business blog either. This is a spam technique, and Google will punish you if you're caught doing it. That means less Google traffic to your blog!
Therefore, don't hide keywords in an extremely small font, don't include a list of keywords in your footer or sidebar (even if you've attempted to disguise them by giving them a name that sounds useful like "Additional Resources"), and don't make them the same color as your blog's background so they're invisible to the naked eye. You'll probably get caught eventually.
3. Don't Publish Duplicate Content
Publishing duplicate content (often referred to as 'content scraping') is another easy way to lose Google traffic to your business blog. Even if you link back to the original source, Google's algorithm is set up to penalize sites that simply duplicate content from other sites. You can even get penalized if you duplicate your own content on your blog.
Therefore, if you publish an article or blog post on another website or blog, don't simply republish the exact same article on your business blog. Similarly, don't publish the same content on multiple pages on your blog. Google doesn't care if you own the content or not. It's algorithm simply flags duplicate content of any kind and penalizes sites that publish it. The reasoning is simple. The best websites and blogs should have a lot of original content, not duplicated content.
4. Make Sure You're Not Publising No Original Content
Just as you shouldn't publish duplicate content on your blog, you shouldn't publish pages and posts that include no original content at all (or very little original content). In other words, don't publish pages and posts that are filled with ads and links but no original text content.
Why would Google deliver your business blog in keyword search results if you're not publishing any content? You can bet that Google's algorithm is configured to penalize websites and blogs that don't publish original content!
5. Never Pay for Text Links or Publish Text Link Ads
Google's goal is to deliver the best search results for keyword searches. The Google algorithm includes the links coming into your blog from other websites and blogs (called "incoming links") as a ranking factor. The assumption is that sites with great content will get a lot of incoming links, particularly incoming links from popular and authoritative websites.
Spammers purchase links to artificially exaggerate the quality of their sites, and when they're caught, Google responds swiftly and harshly by penalizing those sites or banning them from Google search results entirely. In fact, both the site that paid for the text links and the site that publishes the text links in exchange for payment can be penalized. Bottom-line, don't do either if you want to keep Google traffic coming to your business blog.
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