Search engine marketing and placement are some of the best ways to get an online business to get noticed by the search engines and consumers looking for your business’s products and services. It is also the most cost-effective way to reach your target audience because it is a more focused approach to using specific target keywords in your content to reach your audience. However, as the search engines get smarter and their algorithms change, it is important to stay up to date by testing new Search Engine Optimization methods to rank for the keywords that you want to rank for and avoid putting your company at risk of penalization.
Top 5 Things to Avoid When Doing SEO For Your Website
Let’s look at the top 5 SEO common mistakes made by businesses and what you should avoid when attempting to rank your website online.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the most common practice and the #1 SEO mistake made by most webmasters. They stuff their meta tags with the same keywords they use on the page. In the past, some SEO professionals went by the site, and the domain name was a bigger factor for ranking, but the changes to the search engine algorithms place much less importance on the domain name and ranking anymore. Still, you don’t want to overlook it and have someone do keyword stuffing for you. Instead, focus on your potential customer’s search intent words and add as many relevant keywords as possible while ensuring that your content is readable and easy to understand.
2. Buying High PageRank Backlinks For Your Website
This is a big one. Buying expensive PR links is an old hat and a bad idea for the simple reason that it is old. Many SEO firms have used this strategy for years, and the search engine crawlers caught onto this and penalized it. If you go to Google and look up the term “link trusts,” you will see that the first result is a hyped uplink to a dating agency. The site appears to be a one of a kind link that has lots of links feeding it and has a great page rank. This is a cheap shot, and chances are the links are OK so long as you have deep pages that link to multiple pages. The trick is to make sure that the pages are not the same as your main site.
Purchasing lots of links from sites with many links and then having your web designer simply change a few of them a week later is another old and lousy idea. Google and Bing are smart and will catch on. Link building is important, but it should be done naturally and organically. Create original content and engaging blog posts that will provide a great user experience, and other reputable websites will want to link back to your content. This is a better way of creating quality links. Add the search terms that you want to rank for so that search engines can show your content to people.
3. Using Non-Original Or Duplicate Content
It was popular to duplicate the same file on the client’s site for a short while and then give the link from that platform the desired text. It worked pretty well until the search engines thought you were trying to manipulate their system, so they dropped the ball on webmasters. Checks would be done on the websites suspected of creating duplicate content, and if a page were copying and plagiarizing content, it would get penalized, and its search engine rankings would drop.
Therefore it is always a good idea to make sure that you own the rights to any material that links to your blog or site. You must take the time and resources to create a professional content marketing strategy so that you can build trust and authority regardless of what industry your business falls under. The future of SEO is going to be based largely on the reputation that your business has. Google and Bing want to make sure that their users are getting the best information possible.
4. Signing Up With Link Farms
In the early days of link popularity, SEOs used to create PBN’s to improve a website’s rankings. This used to be a successful way to get backlinks pretty easily. It basically entailed creating a thousand sites with the sole intention of linking them to each other. Now search bots ignore these pages.
That said, if done right, this can be a good way to generate some traffic if the external links are relevant. What if you create a few of these mini-sites and have them point to your main site? Over time thanks to the domain name and inbound linking will carry that extra authority your main site lacks.
You can also pass link juice by utilizing internal links efficiently. You can create supporting articles related to your services and products and add links pointing to those pages. Not only will this help with your SEO efforts, but it will help visitors find relevant information required to decide on your company. But you must keep an eye on these links and make sure that you don’t have any broken links.
5. Not Using Unique Page Title & Descriptions
We see this common mistake quite often when a client comes to us for SEO services. Some websites don’t have unique meta titles and descriptions, preventing them from ranking high on Google or Bing. Avoid duplicate title tags like the plague.
The title tags of a page are a very significant SEO signal. Both search engines and users will read the title first to understand what the page is about. Every page on your website must have its own unique title, including the keywords that users are using in the search queries.
Although Google has made it clear that it does not emphasize descriptions when it comes to SEO, it can help your click-through rates. In other words, a quality description will make people want to click on your search result. As long as you provide the content they are looking for; you will see an increase in conversion rates. So act like the description is your sales pitch to searchers looking for your products or services.
So What Are The Best SEO Practices?
While ensuring that you avoid the above common SEO mistakes and implementing sound strategies is good, nothing definite outperforms a well-run search engine optimized or keyword-oriented website. SEO is no longer just about optimizing your technical SEO and getting some backlinks. There are many other strategies that you must combine when it comes to off-page and on-page SEO, which include…
- Being active on Social Media
- Promoting your blog posts
- Using SEO Tools and Google Search Console
- Using high-quality content
- Making sure that your website uses an internal linking strategy
- Your website is optimized for speed and performance, and pages load fast.
- Your Images are SEO optimized
- Targetting high traffic keywords as well as long-tail keywords
- Making sure that your content includes relevant keywords.
These are just some of the most common SEO strategies that every business owner should be implementing in their SEO strategy. Achieving either will take a bit of patience and time if your site is very new. But in time, your business will reap huge rewards by building trust and authority from Google as well as from potential customers.
The bottom line is search engines are not responsible for your financial success. They don’t know your strengths and weaknesses. They don’t have foresight. In fact, their algorithms can change a dime overnight. So while some methods may drive traffic and attention, the quality of the information and quality of service will significantly impact your SEO efforts.
How Search Engines Make Money
The bottom line you need to understand is search engines can only exist if there is data to back it up, and they constantly strive to produce more. When Google came out with its PageRank algorithm, they wanted to measure trust and credibility. This measurement would weigh a website’s “strength” and “competition.” both are determined by the website’s backlinks’ quantity and quality. This is why backlinks are becoming increasingly more important for search engines, along with quality content.
Conclusion
If you care about quality and don’t have the SEO skills, please don’t do it yourself. If you have internal writers with the knowledge and tools required to optimize your content, then let them do it themselves.
If not, hire an experienced SEO agency that will help your website rank on the first page of Google so that you can reap the long-term rewards. A professional marketing agency can provide you with a complete audit to see how your website can be improved overall.
Whether you want to rank locally or in the United States, SEO should be considered a part of your overall digital marketing strategy to grow your business and find success in 2021. It’s important to get as many SEO updates as possible since the algorithms are consistently changing to improve the user experience.
