SEO Common Mistakes
Search Engine Optimisation mistakes happen if you’re focused on the wrong things or too focused on one aspect of SEO and not the other, for example, too many keywords and not enough quality content.
I have been helping clients increase their PageRank and presence online for some time now and I have noticed a pattern with their site optimisation before they came to us. To put it bluntly, it is terrible! But with work, it can be fixed.
Top 5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid
SEO Mistake #1 | Keyword Overloading
There is nothing more irritating than reading copy on a site and thinking, what is this rubbish? There is way too many keywords per paragraph!
If you stuff too many keywords into your copy in an effort to boost your site on Google it might work temporarily, but it will certainly get Google’s attention and eventually your site will roll down to the 2nd, 3rd page or even disappears from the ranks altogether.
The way your structure your content is key! Use your keywords wisely, once or twice per paragraph. The best way to think about this is 5% of the article copy should be your keyword, and make sure to write between 800-1000 words.
[skill value=”95″]Quality Relevant Content[/skill]
Keyword Phrases and Long Tail Keywords
[skill value=”5″][/skill]SEO Mistake #2 | Broken Links
We have all gone through a website redesign, so when you do, test, test and test again! There is nothing worse than broken links on your website. When you build your content and links within your content it is the most important thing to proof read all of it and double check all your old links and fix them if they don’t work.
Fixing the broken links will increase your user experience and improve your website’s PageRank.
SEO Mistake #3 | Copied Content or Copy
It has been done before and it will be done again, either someone will use your copy or you might take a snippet of theirs. This is the worst thing possible for a website, I know from experience that clients have copy on their site and when I did a quick bit of research I found it all to be on other sites already. Google will punish a website for using other peoples copy by ranking the site poorly or even removing it from the index altogether.
Create compelling, unique content. Do your research and take a little extra time to write your copy, this will stand to your website when it comes to getting indexed and raked by Google and other search engines.
SEO Mistake #4 | Page Titles and Meta Tags
It’s easy to use the same page titles and descriptions for all your pages but it’s just not the way it should be. If your not focused on getting a great deal of traffic to all your pages then by all means work away with this approach, but if you’re like 99.9% of the online world then you are interested in getting hits on all your pages.
Use unique page titles on all your pages, if you have a list of services have a unique page title for each of them e.g. if you are a plumber and a service you provide is Bathroom installations a good title can be “Bathroom Installations (Area)|Bathroom Plumber”. The page titles should be descriptive but no longer than 50 – 60 characters.
Meta tags are very important and need to be done right, this is the main source for Google to index the page. Be sure that the meta description is relevant to the copy on the page.
SEO Mistake #5 | Don’t Buy or Take any Links Going
Links are still thought to be the keystone to a sites performance on Google, if you have links coming form high PR authority sites then that is brilliant! Don’t fall into the trap of more is better, this is just simply untrue. You need quality not quantity. It’s like when a parent tells you that your engineering paper on “The Systematic Analysis of Induction Coil Failures” was brilliant, while this is great and builds your self-confidence it’s not the same as your professor making a similar comment. Google acts in a similar way with links, you get the best result from the best links, it’s as simple as that.