Top 10 Common SEO Blunders


seo blunders

Photo by FirmBee, CC0 1.0

If you have a website there’s a good chance you could be making some costly errors. Don’t be too hard on yourself, they’re more common than you think. If you’re looking to enhance your sites recognition, then pay close attention. Here are 10 common SEO blunders.

  1. Not Hiring an SEO Pro

It’s noble to take the reins yourself and make your own decisions to help boost your brand. However, you may be forgetting SEO by itself is a full-time job. You can’t be successful if all your time is spent on one thing.

Professionals make a career out of SEO work. They know how things are trending, and they know which tactics and methods will work best. Hiring a SEO professional is smart and great investment. Don’t let your site or your tinkering impact any success you could have.

  1. Stuffing Keywords

I hope you’re not one of the people who load their site with dozens of keywords to get more hits. If you are…this one’s for you!

The shady technique of stuffing makes your site look poorly operated. It’s not good business, nor does it lead you to rewards from search engines like Google. To the contrary, Google will penalize you for this, and you will appear even further down on searches. Let’s not let this happen.

  1. Avoiding Analytics

Without analyzing your data how can your business ever really improve?

Make sure you go over your goals weekly to analyze the sites successes and failures. Pay close attention to what needs improving. Then monitor those changes to see if they’re working. Don’t focus on web traffic results, focus should be on whether the phrases are converting.

  1. Not Focusing on Link Quality

Search engines love when your site produces fresh content regularly. It’s a great tactic and does have its success. But it isn’t about the quantity you produce. It’s more beneficial to focus on the quality.

Even one great link to a high-quality post can have a much greater impact than hundreds of posts. If your links are relevant to your sites subject matter, don’t have a bunch of outbound link, and aren’t attached to spam sites, you should be good.

  1. Duplicating Content

Having content that’s original is what you’re after.

Any duplicated content on the web can be eliminated for search results. Especially, don’t post duplicate content in multiple areas on your site. This is bad SEO. Reusing won’t help you in any way.

  1. Ignoring Social Aspects

Social media is one of the most widely used tools on the planet. Ignoring this opportunity of publishing content in these outlets would be a shame. This allows more people to see it, but also to share it and reference it. Look to gain from these references that have solid reputations in the field. Will help build up your sites credibility.

  1. Not Checking for Broken Links

Having links that fail to get to their destination is a horrible nuisance. Not only users hate it but so do search engines.

Google will kick you further down rankings when this happens. Reputations that are bad are not considered to be experts in the field. People shouldn’t have to find a link that works, it should always work. It’s smart to do routine checks on your links to avoid this.

  1. Poor Anchor Text Links

Originality and creativity is what search engine crawlers love when it comes to anchor texts. They use this data to assist in their rankings of sites.

A plain hyperlink isn’t as flashy as something that’s interesting. You should make sure all your text links contain keywords that are relatable to the subject of your site. Varying the keywords will be beneficial to avoid penalties.

  1. Oblivious to User Experiences

You should be aware of Goggle’s preferences to reward sites for being user friendly. It’s important to everyone that the users want to come back to your site. To assure your site caters to these user experiences focus on: the speed of the site, available mobile support, its safe, and flash(Adobe) free.

  1. Not Optimizing the Right Keywords

You could be making drastic mistakes with your keyword selections. Remember your audience, if you cater to the local area don’t broadcast global keywords. Also, don’t be generic with your keywords. Try to be specific.

Using specific phrases over generic and simple keywords will be more rewarding and yield higher rankings. Just be aware of your audience.

As long as you prevent your site from making common mistakes like this, you should be able to find success without worry.