Before moving on to discussing the most common SEO mistakes that people make, it is essential that we first understand what SEO is.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is where a set of rules are followed by a blog or website owner to ensure that their website(s) is optimized for search engines; improving their ranking on search engine results.
At the same time, SEO serves as a good way of improving the quality of a website by making it easy to navigate, faster and more user-friendly. It can also be considered to be a framework as the entire process incorporates a couple of guidelines or rules, goes through different stages and uses a set of different controls for it to be effective.
SEO is important in today’s competitive digital-oriented market. For any business looking for more sales or for more customers, embracing SEO is almost a must as it is one of the ways to grow the business and for it to meet its set objectives. As such, as a business, be it a small one or a corporate one, taking up SEO is advised.
However, if you are already doing SEO or even if you are considering taking it up, it is important to understand that they are a couple of things that you need to be very careful about to ensure that you do not do it the wrong way – lowering your chances of getting the kind of results you want, and probably ending up being penalized.
As such, it is essential that you understand some of the most common SEO mistakes being made and which you should avoid doing if you want to get results.
Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid Like The Plague
Keyword Stuffing
One thing that you totally need to avoid when doing SEO is keyword stuffing. This is where you keep on repeating the same information in your website copy. Often, most people doing SEO will want to stuff the main keyword so that it stands out. However, this could prove to be detrimental as at the end of the day it could lead to the reader getting flustered and search engines could interpret it as manipulation and could end up penalizing your website or taking it down from the results page.
Broken Links
Broken links are hyperlinks that are no longer pointing to the intended destination. Such links are a major nuisance because every time anyone clicks on them, the link is broken and is not working. Sadly, websites accumulate broken links over time. The problem with this is that they end up earning your website a bad reputation. When search engine giants like Google discover too many broken links within a website they end up downgrading the websites’ ranking. As such, it is essential that you maintain your website by doing housekeeping regularly.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content on a website is one of the leading causes of sites being downgraded or penalized. Interestingly, this is a problem that has been around for the longest time. The main causes: poor CMS or Content Management System configuration, sloppy SEO coding, or not dealing with the most important stuff.
Duplicate content is basically where a website has the same content, or content that is almost similar to another appearing on more than 2 different URLs. The problem with this is that when a search engine finds duplicate content on your site while crawling it, it could decide to penalize it by lowering its rank; minimizing the amount of traffic towards the site.
Thin Content
What does having thin content mean? This is where the pages on a website do not have sufficient text on them or where site has many pages but each page is not that different from the others. The lack of “much” text is one of the leading causes of websites getting lower ranking. Why? Basically because as a search engine crawls through it, it sees it as a poor quality website without sufficient information to provide; as such, they are considered to be useless and not worth spending time on.
Non-Unique Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
Having non-unique titles and descriptions could negatively impact your website. It is essential that all website page Meta descriptions and title tags be unique and different from others. This is important as things like title tags are amongst the most essential on page search engine optimization factors that search engines consider.
On the other hand, Meta descriptions are also important as they serve as you website’s sales pitch on search results. As such, it is essential to get them right the first time around; if not, a search engine crawling your website may see the confusion and choose not to rank it.
Non-credible Links
In SEO, links that refer to your site are considered to be votes of confidence. They show that your website or blog or page provides information or data that is considered to be reliable and trustworthy. As such, it is essential that you strive to get good-quality and reliable links from credible sources like other websites or blogs.
The problem with so many people handling SEO today is that they want success fast. As such, often time they tend to go for quantity rather than quality. As such, they end up running to link directories and other low-quality sources to get these links. This in turn hurts the image of your website and will end up leading to it losing its ranking on search engine results.
Avoiding Analytics
When one of the biggest mistakes to make when it comes to SEO is avoiding analytics. It is very important that you considering measuring your site’s data. This way, you are able to know which site areas are performing and which aren’t; by doing this, it becomes easier to optimize your site for better results by improving your SEO approach. As such, it is advisable that you take up and use tools like Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to analyze site data for better website configuration and optimization.
There are plenty more mistakes that need to be avoided if you want your SEO campaign is to be successful. However, avoiding the above mentioned mistakes will considerably make it easier to be on the right path when in it comes to the optimization of your website for the best results. Nonetheless, it is still advisable that you do some research on other mistakes that are to be avoided to stay safe as you do SEO on your website.