The 10 most common SEO eRRors
Which SEO errors are negatively impacting your search rankings?
Is it your meta tags? Page speed? Duplicate content?
According to new data, all three of these important factors (and more) very well might be hurting your SEO performance.
1. Selection of Keywords
The key to optimization are the keywords that you wish your website to rank for on search engines. However, are you selecting the correct ones?
2. Posting Content Unrelated to your Keywords
Another common snare in SEO optimization is generating content that’s not really concerning your keywords. The matter of fact is that you simply need to rank for a particular keyword, but you fail to focus the text on your target topic. Search engines like Google make it sure to serve their users with the most relevant content for their search terms. Thus, if your content doesn’t answer user needs, it won’t rank well.
3. Content is King
This next ordinary mistake is expounded to the standard of your content. While duplicating lines was a normal practice back in the days, now search engines punish this approach. Repetition and copying content is seen as a spammy method and is extremely downcast.
4. Poor Title Tags
stunning though this may seem, there are still people who don't write good title tags for the key pages of their site. Search engines still rely on the title tag because it acts like a "top level" label regarding the content of the page.
5. Thin Slicing This sounds similar to thin content, but it's really quite different. This is when you have too many pages that are very similar to each other. For example, if you have pages called: "10 tips for SEO", "11 tips for best SEO", "Best 10 tips for SEO", and "10 great things to do SEO", these pages likely aren’t noticeably different from one another.
6. Mobile Site Issues
Google's Mobile First switchover is coming. In fact, they've already switched over some sites. If you have a responsive website, you probably don't need to worry, but many sites that have mobile subdomains don't show all the same content on their mobile page, or they remove links and/or structured data information. Once Google switches those sites over to Mobile First, these sites are going to take a beating.
7. Backlinks
To get the most out from SEO, content marketers these days should know this that the quality of external links included in content is much more necessary than their quantity. That’s why it’s better to make sure you are linking to relevant, well-ranking and good PR websites with solid online reputation – not simply any website. It’s also helpful to link back to sites that have connected to you, as this brings back traffic later on.
Another dangerous practice when it includes links is using useless anchor text. This wastes valuable SEO opportunities because the anchor texts signify to the reader and to look bots what the link is regarding about and the way it will be beneficial to users. Thus, avoid using ‘click here’ as an anchor text and ensure you pick for a range of anchor texts, and not using a similar text over and over again that will be seen as spammy.
8. Increase Social Media Power with the help of Influencers
Optimization contains a social dimension also. After you are distributing your content on social media, one among your main purpose is to induce the awareness of users who have a major online influence. This indicates that their content gets noticed by each your readers and by search engines. That’s why it’s vital to make a connection with such ‘power users’ and to use their reliability to market your content.
Another side of this can be submitting your blog posts or website promo to social sites like Digg, Reddit, or Quora while not having a power user. It’s abundantly easier to create noise about your content once the user sharing it has plausibility on that network. Building link and doing structured reach via influencers is an essential part of your optimization plan.
9. Excessive Advertising
Many sites are advertising-supported, and there is nothing wrong with that. Where this become problematic is when the ads are so omnipresent that it interferes with users getting value from pages. Google has an algorithm that looks for too many ads above the fold , and will lower rankings if they see that. In addition, such sites are a lot less likely to attract links, mentions and other things that aid in driving search engine rankings.
10. Lack of Website Promotion
What you do on site is critical, but so are efforts to promote your site. Links remain an important ranking factor, but it's also important that you're generating buzz about your brand. If people are talking about your business, this can ultimately lead to higher conversion rates and higher rates of link acquisition.
