10 Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
(Last Updated On: May 13, 2018)

Optimizing your website and blog is one of the indispensable element of your content marketing strategy. While SEO is constantly changing, it must be on top of marketers to do list as agendas as it is a powerful way to bring visitors to your company’s premises/outlets and to direct them towards your sales funnel.

To say that search engine optimization is a challenging task is a bit of an understatement. The well-known algorithms crafted for platforms such as Bing and Google are constantly changing and require trained minds to understand how best to adjust strategies accordingly.

SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2018

Despite this, numerous business leaders hear about the consecutive benefits of SEO and view it as a simple profit-generating venture. Consequently, they have several myths when it comes to searchability that makes errors which have the opposite effect – costing them site traffic and conversions.

Common mistakes in SEO

The good news is many of these common slips can be fixed and agencies such as CandidSky will be there to help businesses resolve them. Yet, if you’re wondering if your approaches to SEO campaign is on the right track, I have detailed some common mistakes which I’ve seen individuals make. I’ll explain each in more detail below, but in summary 10 most common SEO mistakes to avoid are:

  1. Preventing search crawls from taking place

  2. Believing high PR link building (or any strategy) is dead

  3. Investing in link earning, rather than intentional link building

  4. Excessively using keywords in the webpage (Keyword Stuffing)

  5. Neglecting mobile users with regard to user experience

  6. Creating orphan pages

  7. Promoting/reusing already published content

  8. Neglecting local search

  9. Abandoning a strategy too soon

  10. Publishing Non-Original Content

#1 Preventing search crawls from taking place

The robots.txt file is important for any website or blog and specifies pages you don’t want that the crawlers access them. When put like that, it’s appealing to prevent all such search robots from visiting your website. However, it’s worth remembering that search engines use crawlers to find relevant pages to place them as index pages in SERP.

If in case all robots are prevented from accessing your site, you won’t appear in search results. In this situation, it won’t matter how much effort you put into your SEO campaign, your website might get invisible.

#2 Believing link building is dead

To borrow a routinely used phrase, there’s a lot of “fake news” out there. This is also true when it comes to the SEO industry. People haven’t partly spread the given strategy when the time it deserves, they then post articles online claiming what others were doing is ineffective.

Link building is one of the most frequent tactics described as dead but in reality, it is still a viable and essential part of any SEO campaign. This trivializing might be due to how link building has evolved over the years.

Regardless, if you see an article asserting that particular tactics or approach is dead, don’t completely take it at face value. Gather multiple sources and try several strategies practically before writing it off. Chances are, the author of that piece of content has just been doing it wrong.

#3 Investing in link earning, not building

Link earning is a phrase which tends to differ in meaning depending on the person or agency who uses it. While some definitions involve creating quality content and assuming people will read it, others favour some degree of promotion and getting automatic backlinks as a result.

The main difference is when a user links back to his resource (website, article or blog) with the help of techniques like forum posting or blog commenting is called link building.

Whereas link earning is a technique in which others (blog readers) consciously linked back to your piece of stuff because of relevancy and quality. In other words, link earning is something like giving credibility to a piece of genuine work which speaks for itself.

Sadly, this strategy is not as effective as actual link building. While publishing content on your site, try to always invest suitable time and resources in content promotion. In fact, Social Triggers states that, when generating content, 20% of your time should be spent on creation – 80% should be allocated to its promotion.

#4 Excessively using keywords on the webpage (Keyword Stuffing)

In the early days of SEO, using as many mentions of a keyword as possible greatly benefited your campaign. For example, webmasters wanting to rank high in search results for “car reseller agency” generally had to include that phrase more than their competitors in their content to succeed. This technique is known as Keyword Stuffing.

Eventually, it got to a stage when SEO-targeted content became challenging to read and identified.

Are you looking for car reseller agency? Great, we have a fantastic selection of pre-owned cheap cars agency in our online store. Browse our selection of cheap used cars and find a cheap used car to suit your needs and for reselling. Speak to us today about finding a cheap used car reseller.

Thankfully, this strategy does not work anymore. Yet excessive keyword use is still prevalent in some SEO campaigns which is now a part of black hat SEO. These days, relevance, density, and variation are vital when targeting a particular phrase. Not only this is better for improving visibility but – from a UX point of view – it helps the user as well.

 #5 Neglecting mobile users

The browsing habits of users have changed dramatically over the years with the added emphasis on giving preference to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for instant page loads and better user experience.

Whereas people were once limited to desktops, now they can access the internet through tablets and mobiles. In fact, in 2016, the number of internet users on mobile and tablet exceeded desktop for the first time.

However, despite the importance of mobile optimization, research conducted by PayPal this year suggested that only 18% of UK businesses had a website which was completely optimized for mobile.

Needless to say, by neglecting mobile users, companies are missing out on a substantial number of online visitors which someday be their prospective customers.

#6 Creating orphan pages

When a webpage is not linked to from anywhere else on the site, this creates what we call an orphan or dead-end page. By not having any connection or external references, it becomes very challenging for both users and search engines to find. Signifying to the search engines that this page is not a high priority. Similarly, internal links are vital for the flow of SEO value (gained from building an authoritative domain) and easy resource accessibility around a website.

The worst thing about orphan pages is that they are useless for SEO as they can’t be seen by the search bots.

When adding a new page, it’s essential that it is well linked to with a strong internal linking structure. This can include in content links, navigational links (links within menu structures), or breadcrumbs. Otherwise, even if this new resource contains amazing content, it will struggle to rank well.

 #7 Promoting/reusing already published content

When managing a large website, the idea of creating unique content can seem hectic, tiring and requires an insightful thought process. Either on purpose or through accident, it is not uncommon to see remarkably similar content throughout the course of the span. Perhaps it is no surprise that a study published in 2016 revealed that almost 25% of websites suffered from duplicate content issues.

This creates a problem for crawlers, when faced with multiple identical pages, they can struggle to identify the original. As a result, this traditionally leads to decreased rankings and traffic.

Instead, try to promote and reuse site content which is exceptionally doing well.

#8 Neglecting local search

A study conducted by Google in 2016 revealed that more than 60% of smartphone owners used their device to access local information stored on Google maps and adverts. They not only access information but this leads to a quick call to action such as seeing store directions or calling a business. Moreover, the organization revealed half of the consumers who used local search visited a store that same day.

Although this aspect of search is deeply important, some webmasters don’t rate local optimization onto a priority. As a result, they won’t focus on their Google My Business listing, NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) data, finding directions on google maps or local schema. However, by doing so, they could be missing out on an audience base close to home and rank for keywords like ‘restaurants near me’ on searches.

#9 Scrapping strategies quickly

One misconception with SEO is the amount of time it takes for results to appear. All too often, companies will cease strategies after several weeks – accusing them of being ineffective too soon. However, the effects of search engine optimization can take several months to materialize and should continue to improve as time goes on.

When running an SEO campaign, perseverance and patience are two very important qualities to count for.

#10 Publishing Non-Original Content

This next typical mistake is related to the quality of your content. While copying texts was a common practice back in the day, today search engines are so intelligent that they penalize this approach. Copying and plagiarizing content is seen as a spammy practice and is highly discouraged.

Duplicate and sneaky content simply don’t work anymore. Instead of ripping off a copy from other sources or using online software that ‘spins’ or rewrite the content into a new shape. It’s worth investing time in creating original and evocative content. This is the only way to make sure your website doesn’t get pushed in the back or in some cases even banned from search results.

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About Sunny Kumar 42 Articles
Sunny is passionate about Digital Marketing and building Brand Awareness. He is an experimental blogger. He holds a Google Certification in Google Analytics & Digital Marketing having a wide range of industry experience to his credit.

5 Comments

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