SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is widely used in businesses today. SEO is a huge factor in a marketing strategy and it can make or break your marketing efforts. When it comes to SEO there are certain ranking factors that if executed well will produce great search engine results for your company. These days most companies are doing SEO, but knowing which factors are going to get them the highest rankings in the search engines is still sometime tough to decipher. This article will look at the SEO ranking factors that are of most importance to keep you active and relevant in the SEO world.

1. Social media: Two years ago this wasn’t even a factor in SEO, and if it was it wasn’t a make a break type of scenario. Today however ranking high on social media sites is very important to achieve high ranking in the search engines.

2. Go easy on the advertising: now more than ever, some websites with too much advertising are receiving a lower ranking in the search engines versus those companies who use advertising moderately. Keep in mind that if people want to buy your product or service they will, but they are less likely to do so if they feel a company only sees them as a profit, keep a humanistic approach and keep advertising to a moderate level.

3. Backlinks; they are still important: Regardless of the rising power of social media, backlinks remain one of the most critical factors in achieving good rankings.

4. The keywords still matter; despite popular belief these days that keywords do not matter as much for SEO, this just isn’t the case. Having good solid keywords and using them throughout your site and various pages online, will allow your company to rank higher in search engines. Use your keywords!

There are a few other SEO ranking factors to consider spending some time on such as; brand power and word count on your website however we believe the four here are the most important. If you keep in mind these essentially ranking factors in SEO, your website will rank high in search engines and your company will experience growth because of your SEO efforts.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Marketing can be highly effective when done right, however it can produce just the opposite results when done incorrectly. SEO marketing allows companies to rank high on search engines such as Google, Bing, and others by using specific techniques and tools to achieve optimal search rankings. Below is a list of common pitfalls to avoid in SEO marketing.

1. Quality vs. Quantity: When businesses first began to dive in the SEO pool, a common practice was to jam-pack their websites with a ton of content, cram in as many keywords as possible in order to achieve higher search rankings. Quality content is a lot more important in SEO marketing than the quantity of content. The content on your website has to be useful and valuable to your customers so they will come back. Think about your customers, not just your rankings.

2. Link Farms: Paying people to link to your website or drive traffic to your website will do little to nothing to improve your search rankings. “Link Farms” will not help you succeed in SEO marketing. Paying for website traffic is not something that anyone should do. If you want to increase your website traffic, enhance the quality of your website content.

3. “SEO Experts”: It seems that everyone is an expert in something these days, and SEO marketing is no different. Do not get scammed by someone claiming to be an expert in SEO marketing. A thorough background check is always the way to go, ask for references as well as evidence of their work. SEO experts can be highly effective in helping your company gain website exposure and traffic, just be sure they are actually who they say they are.

4. SPAM: Bottom line; make sure your website is not seen as spam by customers and potential customers. Some companies use spam techniques such as linking their website in forums, and other places on the web to increase their website traffic. While this is ok to do, be sure that if you are linking on a forum or blog you are also contributing content to the forum or blog as well, that way customers will see a reciprocal relationship happening and will be more likely to link back to your website.

Working to avoid these common mistakes in SEO marketing will greatly increase your chances of running a successful SEO campaign. The more knowledge and practice you have with working with SEO, the easier it will become to avoid these pitfalls.