You have decided to opt for SEO to increase the traffic and optimize a number of visitors per day on your website. Before you start, understand that SEO is not an exact science, it is surrounded by lots of myths and wrong information that can be misleading.
Working with the wrong company or following incorrect information will be a big loss, not only in terms of money and time but it can also lead to the penalty or ban from search engines.
The penalty would be the last thing you can think of while you are planning to promote your website, so learn from the mistakes done by others. Let’s understand a few of the major & most common SEO mistakes and how to avoid them.
Keywords- Not Selecting them wisely
An optimization is dependent on your selection of keywords, that’s why you should refrain yourself from selecting the wrong keywords. The most common error people make while selecting keyword is, they ignore the preference of search engines and users for long-tail keywords.
It is more important to understand which word will hit your potential customers or how they categories your product. Instead of focusing on your way of defining your product and services, focus on what words your potential customers can use to refer them. Sometimes the words can be so generic and sometimes it can be completely different from what you mean to deliver, in both the scenarios you will be optimizing wrong keywords.
Do some research before starting SEO, there are few tools that can help you in research work such as Keyword Planner, Google Adwords, Google trends, etc, once you have done all the homework then only start with optimization.
Not Optimizing for Local Search
If your business and customers are local, optimization should be handled a bit differently than using keywords that are more common in global search. Learn more about local search because most of the search engines including Google handle local search differently.
Search for the area-specific keywords, include them in your page titles and meta description. Don’t forget to add your address and local phone number either in header or footer of your page to get the visibility in local search results. Once these basic steps are met, list yourself in local sites and review networks such as Google Places, FourSquare, yelp, etc.
Stuffing Your Website with Keywords
The biggest myths or mistake in the world of SEO is stuffing. People assume that using target keywords in every sentence of the content boosts up the rating. It’s not correct and in some situations using keywords too many time can be registered as spam by search engines which means instead of increasing the site traffic it hurts the performance as well as ranking.
Stuffing or overusing the keywords makes your content unnatural or useless for the audience, that’s why it is not recommended. If you think that you won’t be caught by search engines, you are mistaken because, in today’s hi-tech world, search engines are extremely upgraded and can easily catch everything. Instead of these practices focus on good content which will be beneficial for the ranking of your site.
Content not up to the mark
The basic goal of a search engine is to quickly provide the quality and relevant content to its users. Search engines are now becoming more and more effective in filtering poor or copied content from their search results. Just writing content for the sake of content will not help any more, don’t repeat the common mistake of purchasing low-quality content.
Content plays a vital role, your visitors can easily judge the uniqueness and quality, attracting a customer can be easy but making them stay depends on the impression your content will leave. So, hire a good writer who can deliver original articles, it may cost you more but it’s a good investment that will surely pay you back. The key is, you have to invest your time as well as money to get the desired quality content.
Allowing Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is extremely bad for your website, it can even get your article excluded from search results. Always, be sure that all your content is unique and don’t reuse the same content on different sides or part of your website.
Your web developer can assist you in checking for duplicate content and setting up “canonical” tags to resolve any type of duplicate content issues.
Overlooking Page Titles & Meta Descriptions
Don’t forget title tags and meta descriptions are vital elements of SEO. Optimizing your content is not just complete by including the target keywords in your articles.
Missing titles and meta description mean a missed potential for your content because these are the major optimizing factors as per the search engines while browsing your website.
If you will focus on these basic, you will notice a drastic improvement in your content’s performance. Another important technical details that content marketers tend to forget is to add the image tags, they are important because search bots cannot see the pictures, but they can read your alt tags which can help them in adding the information.
Not adapting the SEO changes
Search engines keep upgrading their tools which means they are continuously changing their algorithms to come up with the improved version of tools and to keep a proper check on the cheaters who try to manipulate the system.
There are few major changes in the google in past years and multiple small updates that significantly changed the way of ranking websites by Google’s search engines. If you are not updated with the latest changes, you won’t be able to give your best as per the present norms.
So, keep yourself updated with the latest trend or change in SEO for achieving a good search ranking. If you are not comfortable or doesn’t have the bandwidth to keep up with the latest changes than it will be beneficial for your website to team up with SEO experts who are ready to help you with the latest trend in the market.
Very well written points. Generally people don’t focus on it. If we will work on these points results will surely come.
I have spent the last 1 hour reading this and taking notes for my own blog, Very helpful! Thank you.
That’s really good research you have done. Thanks for the great information.
I was just looking for this information for some time. After 6 hours of continuous Googleing, finally I got it in your web site. I wonder what’s the lack of Google strategy that do not rank this kind of informative sites in top of the list. Usually the top web sites are full of garbage.