Many people make mistakes when working with SEO; it’s easy to make a mistake because there are so many different things you can do, and everyone thinks that their ideas are the best.
SEO, when done correctly, is an amazing technique to increase organic traffic to your site, but if you’re not careful, it can lead to numerous penalties or just flat out poor rankings. Here are some of the most common mistakes that I see made by marketers online today – I hope that these tips will help you avoid making similar mistakes in your business!
1) Keyword Stuffing
Keywords play a very important role in SEO; they tell search engine crawlers what content on your page is about. However, for this mechanism to work effectively, you need to use your keywords in moderation.
If you stuff your page with keywords, it will look like spammy content to search engines and they won’t index your site. Any SEO Sydney company professional or SEO company anywhere on the globe would advise against this. As much as you want to increase traffic and conversion rates, you have to use a creative and attractive approach. Moreover, using the same keyword over and over again is also not good practice; make sure that you vary up your keyword usage when writing content or else it can be marked as spam by Google algorithms.
2) Poor Internal Linking
Internal linking is not very common among people who are new to SEO. Oftentimes, businesses overlook or skip one key step in the SEO process – internal link audit. An internal link is simply a hyperlink on one page of your site that points to another page of your site.
You should structure your content so that you can put internal links in very naturally; for example, if you were writing a blog post and wanted to mention another article on your site, you would simply write:
“Lorem Ipsum is simply a dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.”
Then at the end of this block – before your “more info” tags – you can add something like:
“For more information on this topic, read my other article on ‘The History of Lorem Ipsum’.”
When you do this for all of your content, it will create a text silo. By doing this, you’ll be able to structure your site so that Google can crawl and index your page better because it’s linking back to relevant pieces of content.
On the other hand, if you don’t have any internal links within your site… well, how are people supposed to find related content? Make sure that you’re providing ways for users to navigate through your site!
3) Unattractive Site Design
We all know that design doesn’t really matter when it comes to ranking in Google. However, a lot of people still try to rank their pages by only structuring the content without thinking about design.
We have to admit sometimes that pretty design is nice, but it isn’t going to help you get on the front page of Google for competitive keywords like “SEO” or “paleo recipes”. If your site looks like it was designed by an amateur Web designer with Frontpage, then you’re not going to rank high in search engines; users don’t trust ugly websites!
The design doesn’t matter as much as most people think – but if your website is spammy and really low-quality looking, no one will want to visit and link to your pages.
This practice won’t make you rank well in search engines – if anything, it will only help you get filtered out.
You can see examples of this when you Google something like “SEO tips” and click through the ads at the top of the page. You’ll notice that most of these companies don’t look trustworthy or professional because their websites are clunky-looking and full of grammatical errors! Nobody who has a good website would ever pay for advertising on Google with an ad like this because they know that no one is going to click on it. So if your site looks spammy, users will be less likely to trust you – which means you won’t get any links…
4) Not Optimized For Mobile
We all use our phones to check Facebook and occasionally search for things on Google – it’s a fact of life. Nowadays, there are more mobile device searches than desktop searches. So if your website is not optimized to be viewed across all devices – including iPhones, Androids, tablets, iPads, etc. – you’re going to lose potential traffic from users who only use their phones to look at websites!
We live in a day and age where technology is moving extremely quickly. Because technologies are constantly changing, people put a lot of time into finding the newest gadgets and toys. Because of this focus on tech, more people will buy a shiny new phone every year and immediately want to download the hottest apps that their friends are using, which means if your site isn’t mobile-friendly people will simply find a better alternative and never return.
Because 90% of users now use smartphones, having a website that is both accessible from all devices (including desktop computers and smartphones) as well as optimized for those browsers (making text bigger and easier for you to navigate) is imperative.
Mobile search queries exceeded desktop search queries in 2016 – there’s no question that this trend will continue into this year and beyond! If your site wasn’t made with responsive design it won’t be able to compete against other sites that were.
5) Not Creating Original Content
We’ve all heard about Copyscape – this is a search engine that can tell you how many times your content has been plagiarized online. You should avoid using it as much as possible, but if you have to use it, definitely don’t go over 10%. Don’t forget that if your website contains too much copied content, Google will penalize your rankings because they simply won’t trust your site.
Think about it! If someone went to the trouble of finding and linking to one of your pages on their own blog (by writing an awesome article), wouldn’t you be mad if all of a sudden people started showing up on their blog instead of yours? Of course – because every time another person links to you, get more link juice and authority and you rank higher.
If someone sees two articles with the same information, who do you think is going to be trusted more: the site that was first and took the time to write amazing content – or the site that copied and pasted someone else’s work?
The thing is, if you want to rank high in search engines, then it’s really important for your website to stand out from all of your competitors. There’s a reason they’re ranking higher than you – because they’re doing something special that you’re not!
Nevertheless, you can still copy someone else’s article word-for-word and mix it up a little bit so Google doesn’t immediately identify it as plagiarism – but don’t leave them completely unoriginal or people won’t trust your site.
These are only five significant SEO mistakes that could be hurting your rankings. One of these is having a lot of plagiarized content on your site which leads people not to trust you. Another one is not optimizing your mobile-friendly website so users who only search from their phone switch over to a competitor. And lastly, one is not creating original content on your site so people find it impressive compared to other sites in their industry.