To date, many website owners are still clueless as to what search engine optimization or SEO is all about. They believe that it’s just about putting keywords in the content and that’s it.
Well, SEO is a lot more complex than mere keywords. There’s so many things that go into doing SEO correctly that committing the biggest SEO mistakes is very common.
With websites going neck-to-neck for rankings, it is crucial that you are aware of what these SEO mistakes to avoid are. Without further ado, here are the things you should watch out for:
Not Using Google Webmaster Tools
First, there are over 1.17 billion people who use Google to search for whatever they need, according to Statista.com. This means that if you want your site’s SEO to improve, the best tools you can possibly use are what’s offered by Google itself.
Also, Google Webmaster Tools are free. They give you a range of metrics and SEO parameters of your website. In short, the things you need in order to improve your search engine rankings.
Bad Content
Content is king, there’s no question about that. Visitors are attracted to your site because of the information you offer. They stick around because they want to know more.
Now, if you’re successful in getting them on your website and they discover that the content you offer isn’t really useful, they will leave without hesitation. This is one of the most common SEO mistakes.
It’s not only poorly written or irrelevant content, it’s also copied content that really hurts your site.
In a case study by Peter Myers, he outlines three types of duplicate content: true duplicate, near duplicate, and exact repeats across sites. Be mindful of these kinds of content, and to be on the safe side, make your content unique.
Uncrawlable Website
Having a website that cannot be crawled is a mistake that’s both big, and odd.
The reason why you’ve built a website is to share your products and services with the visitors. But if you don’t design your website in a way that can be accessed by the search engines, you’re leaving money on the table.
The most common cause of this is either blocked robots.txt files, broken sitemaps, or overall inaccessible site structures.
Not Using the Right Words
Finding the right word is tricky. However, it is essential that you get your keywords right for your content and your site.
Court Tuttle of The Keyword Academy shared his case study on how he used his keywords to see how his pages rank. Not surprisingly, some gained more popularity than the others.
Moreover, picking the right keywords isn’t enough, you must use them the right way too. As Matt Cutt explains, even though it’s an unrelated example, if you’re talking about Mount Everest’s height, don’t simply use “Mount Everest Elevation” as the keyword. Rather, use “How High is Mount Everest” because this is what people actually type in the search query.
Too Much Link Building
Why is it an outrageous mistake? Because too much is always bad. White.net, previously SEOptimise Blog, did a case study on one site that built 10,000 backlinks in a day. What happened? According to the case study:
“The site ended up ranking #1 on Google.com for this keyword for about three weeks.”
But after that:
“[…] the site suddenly dropped out of search results for everything, including brand searches, and what’s more it’s never bounced back.”
SEO may be complicated, but if you do it right and avoid these common SEO mistakes, your site should be just about okay.