Critical SEO Mistakes to Avoid

In Blogging by Tomothy Cole

Many new marketers and webmasters are not really aware of how exactly SEO works. If you want to get free targeted traffic to your site then you must understand SEO. Nowadays, the majority of the people online use search engines for finding information and products they want to buy. If you are not leveraging search engine traffic for your business, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Vague, Broad Keywords

The first mistake many webmasters tend to make when trying SEO is they stuff their content with too many vague keywords. Keywords are necessary for SEO purposes, but if you just cram them into your text, the search engines won’t like this and they’ll give you a penalty because they’ll think you are spam. You’ll lose your ranking due to the overabundance of the keywords on your site, which means you’ll lose the traffic too. The readers of your site will become turned off because they’re looking for content that’s legible and offers the information they seek.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the most overlooked SEO strategies most people. It’s difficult to control how other sites link to you, but you have total control when it comes to linking your internal pages. Linking strategy is a gem that is not even employed by most and you can reap the rewards of having higher page rankings. Your linking strategy can be your secret weapon that shoots you past your competition because most of them aren’t utilizing it.

Honestly, you probably won’t find another SEO technique that will give you such all-around good results. And these aren’t short lived results. There are plenty of examples to observe a good internal linking strategy, one that comes to mind is Amazon.com; notice how they provide you with plenty of recommendations that send you to related products?

Poor Title and Writing

An SEO mistake many webmasters make is choosing a poor title and writing a bad description, which can seriously damage your overall rankings. Your title and description are used by the search engines to determine your site’s theme and rank it accordingly. Search engines are no longer what they used to be a few years ago, which is why you need to give extra focus to these elements. Overall, successful SEO methods can be boiled down to several small elements and tactics designed to work well together to provide you with results. Blackhat tactics can be very tempting, with their promise of instant results and improved rankings almost immediately, but you also risk getting your site banned with these unethical methods. Work with the more reliable Whitehat methods that can still offer the same results, but will last for the long term and continue bringing in targeted traffic for years to come.

With the knowledge that you will get more traffic the higher you rank on the first page should be enough of a reason to learn SEO. Instead of going over the best practices, we are going to inform you about the things to avoid at all costs. SEO is about flowing with the search engine’s algorithm so any “shortcut” and black hat methods will usually backfire after awhile.

SEO

On-page SEO is the most common mistake that webmasters and new internet marketers make. For something that people have complete control over; it’s shocking that so many neglect it. The definition of on-site SEO can be simplified to the way you layout your site’s elements and content. For instance, all your pages should have the heading tags placed properly, along with the ALT tags, file names and titles. Each on-page element should contain your main keywords. On-site optimization is one of the search engine’s ways of giving higher ranking to the sites that will give their searchers the best experience. These are very basic on-page SEO methods that will be implemented by your competing sites, so it’s always good to stay ahead.

Messing up your keyword research will mess up you SEO results. The best SEO starts with good keyword research. Without targeted traffic you won’t make any sales. Your focus should be on keywords that are popular among searchers. Keywords are how people search and how the search engine determines which sites to show in the results, so they should be one of your main priorities. The key is to locate lower competition keywords and to build your content around them. Free keyword tools that can be accessed online are available to put together a list of keywords.

Ignoring or overlooking the guidelines offered by the search engines is a big mistake.

This is why you will always want to heed those guidelines so that your SEO methods are always in the search engine’s favor. The search engines are constantly altering their rues so it’s important to look them up as often as you can so that you never incur a penalty. For instance, when we look at Google, we see it changing its search engine algorithm on a regular basis, so if you don’t go by their rules, your ranking will probably fall. Therefore, always use good ethics when conducting your SEO practices. Some webmasters have no idea the damage the above mistakes can do to their website. If you just fill your site with various keywords, it will look like it’s a spam site. It’s also important never to use content you’ve copied from other sites or else you will lose traffic and the search engines will drop you in the ranks. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to do it yourself or you’re going to hire someone to do your SEO for you, only use the most ethical SEO methods.