TOP 7 COMMON SEO MISTAKES TO AVOID

May 8, 2018

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Optimizing your site and blog is a basic element of your content marketing strategy. While SEO is transforming, it stays on the top of marketers’ agendas as it is a powerful method to bring traffic to your company’s outlets and to direct them towards your business funnel.

SEO methods are always advancing because of search engines’ improvements and users’ changing perspectives. It isn’t that simple to stay on top of the most successful optimization techniques, with many businesses falling into the trap of incorrectly doing SEO. Instead of seeing massive traffic and increased conversion rates, the outcomes can be quite the opposite.

There are some regular SEO mistakes that are difficult to avoid. Testing optimization approaches are also difficult because on the grounds that you can’t confirm your strategies continuously since web crawlers’ standards are becoming hard to predict.

While the optimization field is regularly advancing, a few practices are proving successful, while others are destructive over the long run. Let’s review the top seven normal SEO mistakes you should avoid so your business’ website will bring the desired results to match your efforts.

Mistake #1: Choosing the wrong keywords

Optimizing is all about the keywords that you need your website to rank for. But are you choosing the right ones?

One of the most common mistakes in selecting keywords is neglecting the preference of search engines and users for long-tail keywords. While you may characterize your product and services in a certain way, it’s more important to understand what words your potential users would use to refer to them. Sometimes the terms you consider right may mean something completely different for other people or could be nonspecific. In either case, you will be optimizing for all the wrong keywords.

it’s best to do your background research carefully before you begin the optimization. Utilizing tools like the Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMrush and Moz Keyword Explorer can help immensely in putting your finger on the pulse of trending and adequate keywords.

Mistake #2: Keyword stuffing your website

You may think utilizing your objective keyword in each sentence of your content would help your ratings. That strategy couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, going overboard with using keywords is registered as spammy by search engines, which means it actually hurts your SEO performance.

That is the reason keyword ‘stuffing,’ or overusing your proposed keywords, isn’t vital to your SEO achievement. Such an approach would make your content unnatural and pointless for its target audience. In fact, Google is utilizing a unique semantic inquiry called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This program can recognize your content’s subject without the requirement for stuffing your content with repetitions of your target keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing

Mistake #3: Ignoring meta descriptions and title tags

Optimizing your content does not complete once you include an objective keyword in your articles. Title tags and meta descriptions are fundamental components of SEO that should not be forgotten. Skipping them means a huge missed potential for your content. These factors are considered via search engines when crawling your website, so if properly done, they can improve the execution of your content.

Another important detail that content marketers at times overlook is including image tags. The alt tags of the images you include into your content are vital, as they are another indication of how you are focusing on articles. Search bots can’t see the images – however, they can read the alt tags and include this information in the way they list your pages.

Mistake #4: Irrelevant internal linking

There are also common mistakes while including internal links that you should watch out for. Normally, it’s critical to consider your best-performing pages and consider placing links to them in your content. This is a way to give them visibility and make extra boost. But, ensure you do exclude internal links only for having them in an article.

Similarly, as with keyword stuffing, it’s critical to keep an eye out and not overdo internal linking. If the content and links seem unnatural, the work won’t be valued by your customers. It would not be positively treated via search engines either, as it can be viewed as a fraudulent practice.

Mistake #5: Having a slow website

In 2016, Google announced that page speed would affect your website rankings. It really refers to the time a visitor needs to wait until your page is completely loaded. On average, a page load for e-commerce website takes 7 seconds in the meanwhile the perfect load time is around 3 seconds or less.

As a matter of facts, it has an impact on your audience user experience. A bad UX can cost you a loss of revenue if your target has to wait too long to get what they are looking for. They will simply close your website. And above all, a slow page load is punished by the search engines and affects your positioning, both on mobile and desktop devices

What can lower your page speed?

Your Host– You get what you paid. Over the long haul, a cheap offer can harm your page speed. Pick the correct host that fit your business size.
Too large pictures: Images which are too heavy to load can truly bring down your page speed. It is frequently because of additional data included in the comments or to a lack of compression. Prefer PNG for images that don’t require high details like logos and JPEG for photos.
External Embedded Media: External media like videos are very significant yet can to a great extent bring down your load time. To gain some load time, host the videos on your own server.
Too many ads: More than just bothering your visitors, lots of ads have the drawback to slow down your page speed.
Your themes: Some highly designed themes containing a lot of effects can penalize your load page.

Mistake #6: Missing Quality Links

To get the best from SEO, content marketers today should grasp that the quality of external links included in content is more important than their quantity. That’s why it’s better to make sure you link to relevant, well-ranking websites with solid reputations – not just to any site. It’s also useful to link back to sites that have linked to you, as this brings back traffic in the future.

Another counterproductive practice when it comes to links is using ineffective anchor text. This wastes precious SEO opportunities, as the anchor texts signify to the reader and to search bots what the link is about and how it can be beneficial to users. Thus, avoid using ‘click here’ as an anchor text and make sure you opt for a variety of anchor texts, as employing the same text over and over again can be seen as spammy.

Mistake #7: Ignoring analytics

Last but not the least, the best way to know whether your SEO optimization and content efforts work is to keep track their progress. Many marketers would dismiss the numbers, however, this is a serious mistake. Setting up and regularly evaluating your analytics is fundamental for your optimization results.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are only two of the primary tools you can use to measure and get a review of your website’s performance. With their help, you can see how your optimization is working for the different types of content and utilizing different strategies you are experimenting with.

Search engine optimization is a vital piece of any content marketing strategy today. While you can discover a lot of advice online, making a number of typical SEO mistakes is quite common. Rather, it’s smarter to get all around familiar with the difficulties that others have encountered and keep away from them in your marketing efforts. These seven errors have proven quite widespread, so they are now easier to recognize before you make them.