Optimizing your website is a critical component of your marketing strategy and drives traffic to your site, ultimately resulting in the increase in revenue. SEO is constantly evolving and marketers do need keeping a watchful eye on the latest algorithms developments if they want to stay on the top of their game. Here are some SEO mistakes which they need to avoid in the long run to save themselves from falling into the trap of doing SEO incorrectly. Avoid these mistakes completely if you want your website to stand the test of time.
Choosing your Keywords Incorrectly
As we all know, keyword research is the backbone of SEO. Selecting the right and relevant keywords for your target audience is essential for ensuring the success of your SEO campaigns. One of the gravest mistakes is selecting keywords not suitable for your users or for the preferred audience. The keywords might be quite generic instead of being long tail keywords.
It also happens sometimes that the words/phrases you might think are suitable to be included as keywords might mean completely different in the context you are using them. The best way is to do a background research and use popular tools for selection of keywords such as Google Keyword Tool, SEM Rush and so forth.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is an obsolete technique that was being applied by SEO professionals in the past to obtain high rankings on SERPs. However, this is no longer the case as of today. In fact, using more than required number of keywords can be the reason of being labeled as spammy links from Google’s perspective. Such content is not useful and gives an unnatural look resulting in the increase in bounce rate. It can hurt your overall SEO performance.
Low-Quality Content
Search engines are gradually becoming more effective at differentiating quality content from spammy/poor content. If you are following such practices, it won’t help you at all in your search engine results. You need to invest time and efforts to produce quality content if you want to rank well on search engines.
Besides quality content, don’t ever commit the mistake of using duplicate content on your website. Never use software that spins content into a new shape. Such article spinning tools are worthless and your website could be penalized or pushed back on search results. People are able to tell the difference between an original piece of content and if it’s of any value or not. If they find it worthless, you will lose trust and you will have a more difficult time getting back to your original rankings. Hire writers who can produce original and relevant articles.
Missing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Optimizing your content well is of paramount importance. Simply including target keywords within your content is not sufficient for applying SEO for your articles. Including unique title tags and meta descriptions as well are essential. If you skip them, it can lead to a huge loss for ranking well on the major search engines.
If these factors are considered properly they can miraculously improve the performance of the website. Image tags are also something which marketers mistakenly skip or completely ignore. Image tags or alt tags is indeed something you should take care of. Search engine crawlers read those img tags and that will help you in indexing your pages faster.
Lack of Quality Links
The quality of your incoming links is much more significant than the quantity. Search engines give significance to the quality of your links. Make sure that you link to relevant and high authoritative websites, not just any website. Committing the mistake of giving the significance of simply increasing the number of links is the most blunderous decision anyone can make.
Also, using ineffective anchor text also results in complete wastage of SEO opportunities. Avoid using phrases such as ‘click here’ as an anchor text and make sure that you use different anchor texts with a lot of variety as using the same text repeatedly can be seen as spammy. Refrain from buying links from spammy websites, posting countless links on blog comments or joining low-quality directories and participating in link farms.
Skipping Google Analytics
The only way to know about the success or failure of your SEO campaigns is by using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Both of these should be configured to your website. These are essential for tracking your progress. Regularly reviewing analytics is essential for knowing the real facts and figures about your optimization results. Using both these tools will help you in ultimately working out different types of strategies.
If you are not measuring the website’s data you will be never able to know the areas of the site which are performing well and the ones which are not, so that you can optimize your site by using various techniques. Some of the parameters you must watch out for include conversion goals and monitoring which keywords are converting and which aren’t.