For the experienced webmaster, mistakes seem to be a thing of the past. But in 2017, you’ll be surprised by the sheer number of people that are making mistakes within the world of optimization. You may think that you have all the bases covered, you may even think that you are free of any mistakes, but honestly, it’s easy to fall short.
Looking for a better chance at getting optimized for search? Then the following mistakes have to be changed. These are the most common SEO mistakes that people continue to make, even though there’s a lot of info available. If you can avoid these, and stick to them, you’ll be just fine in terms of SEO.
Mistakes When Choosing Keywords
The biggest error people make is in relationship to keywords. If you have a string of words, and you are trying to rank for all of them, stop. You cannot get anywhere if you are just focusing on the most common keywords. To avoid mistakes like this, take your time ranking for 1 competitive keyword, then lesser competitive options.
If you chase the same keywords others do, you are going to have a hard time getting traction. It’s just too hard to get momentum when you’re chasing the same keywords that other companies are chasing. Don’t focus on mistakes that others make, focus on your own keyword errors.
Stuffing Keywords Into Content
Want to know a little mistake that can snowball fast? Keyword stuffing, and it’s rampant. You may find that certain keywords are great to use, but if you stuff them into improper uses, you will not get search results. Amidst the most common mistakes, this is one of the most common because people don’t seem to think it’s that bad.
There is no good thing that is going to come from stuffing keywords into the wrong areas. Don’t do this. You can make other mistakes, but this is a critical one. This will cause search engines to discredit your best work.
Publishing Content That Doesn’t Answer Questions
When you publish anything online, it has to answer questions. The best content online does this. You don’t have to create a FAQ of sorts, but you should think about the end user. The end user needs to know what they are getting from your site. You should answer questions through content management.
This doesn’t mean that you should write thousand-word epics, but rather focus on a balanced array of topics. Focus on publishing elements that work towards answering the right questions. The more you do this, the less likely you’ll make keyword mistakes, that’s for certain.
Duplicate Content Management
Another great issue that you will find rampant online is publishing duplicate content. If you’re publishing anything that is not your own, or that you’ve lifted from a zine site, you are not going to get very far. In fact, you’re going to find that this is beyond the other mistakes that you will read on this page. Duplicate content is going to cause a great deal of stress to your search results.
Duplicate content shows up in search engines for a day, or two, and then collapses your entire SEO plan. No good website today has traffic with a lot of duplicate content. Amidst the other mistakes, this is one that is hardest to get over, and will cause serious damage to your website’s visibility online.
Skipping SEO Basic Elements
People don’t see skipping SEO basics as part of a mistake. In fact, most common mistakes don’t always pertain to this, but it happens. Skipping out on title tags, meta tags, alt tags, and header tags is a mistake. While Google doesn’t emphasize greatly on them, they still help your ranking.
As far as mistakes are concerned, this is an easy one to make. It’s one of the most common issues because people forget that they need to employ basic elements in their marketing strategy. Your initial setup should have title tags, meta descriptions and much more. If they don’t, then you are going to lose indexing fast.
If you’re using WordPress then I highly recommend you check out the YOAST SEO Plugin. It’s an all-in-one plugin for WordPress that helps you manage and improve your search results and ranking in Google. It has a ton of presets out of the box and it will also alert you if you need to take action. It’s used by millions of WordPress users and is considered a must-have plugin for WordPress based websites.
No Back Links
Perhaps the most common of mistakes that you may find for your own sites is in regard to back links. You need to have a back-link strategy that focuses on quality, authority pages linking to your site. If you do not, you will not be able to gain much traction moving forward, simple as that.
Look, it’s easy to make mistakes. But in terms of long term SEO, you need to factor in changes and updates often. Fix your errors and you will see a big boost in the long term.
