SEO Mistakes to Avoid

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Whoever does anything close to content marketing, knows how important SEO is. It is for every marketer the most important thing in their job. Everything is just around SEO. Good SEO makes better ranking in search engines and brings you more traffic on your site.

While creating content, you need to consider what you need to do to create quality content. There are a lot of tools that might make it easier for you to create the content you want. For example, Yoast SEO is a tool that can help you.

Content creation requires skills and experience. There are attributes of SEO that are the must-have in every content you create. The most important is the authority of the host domain. Also, you’ll need defined keywords. You can’t create relevant content without keywords. Furthermore, you should use internal and external links, images. Write meta descriptions that shortly tell what your website is about. You’ll need a title of the site any many more attributes to create good and quality content.

Picture 1. Components of Google’s Ranking Algorithm

In this article, we will be talking about the most common mistakes in terms of SEO. There are mistakes that can cause problems for your content like using wrong keywords, not relevant keywords to the content, forgetting about title tags, slugs and meta descriptions. So, try to avoid them. How to avoid them, you can read in this article. These mistakes or some more of them, you can find in the upcoming paragraphs.

Wrong Keywords

What are even keywords? Keywords are words that need to be set while creating a site. So, when someone writes one of your keywords in search engines, your article will be recognized by the defined keywords. If your SEO is not good, your site probably won’t be on the top of the engines.

Using wrong keywords lead you to vainly writing a content. Your site won’t be effective so the whole content doesn’t make sense because it won’t reach the top position in search engines. Consequently, try to select the keywords that people will most probably use when they search for your website. Also, you should try to predict what words people will use.

Use tools to do the research of the most effective keywords. For starting an optimization, consider using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs or Google Trends.

Overusing Keywords

If you think that using keywords in your content as much as possible is good, don’t do that. That’s a completely wrong strategy. Google considers it as a spammy content which results with the failure of your SEO. An approach like this is useless and unnatural for the audience you target.

Another useful tool might be Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This program recognizes your topic and helps you to define where to use keywords.

Irrelevant Content

When you determine keywords for the content of the site, you need to focus on those keywords. If keywords are not relevant to the topic, SEO will recognize it and SEO optimization will be bad. SEO is really smart, isn’t he? Ranking for certain keywords, your text needs to focus on the keywords. Google’s main goal is to provide the best content. Thus, if the optimization of your content isn’t good, the ranking will be bad.

One of the biggest SEO mistakes in terms of relevance of the content is trying to fit a few different topics into one. This results with forcing keywords into content without any sense. You’ll hardly use relevant keywords in a topic where you elaborate more topics. The primary goal for every SEO optimization should be providing content that meets the needs of your targeted audience. If keywords are mutually related, the ranking will be good and position in search rankings will grow by the time.

Related: How to Define Your Brand Voice

Ignoring Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Once you write quality and relevant content, put in keywords that explain the sense of the content, your job is not over. There are parts of the SEO that you mustn’t forget. Title tags and meta descriptions present essential parts of the SEO because search engines use them to find out is it related to the content. If it’s done properly, a performance of the content will be fine, if not, your results will be bad. Similarly, you shouldn’t miss out on putting alt text. This is also one of the most common SEO mistakes. They are used for bots to tell them what picture is about. Bots cannot see the picture, so they judge by the alt text is it relevant to the content. Alt text for pictures is not anything hard to set, so don’t do this mistake. This can truly improve the ranking of your page.

Forgetting About Links

Links are the element of SEO which greatly impacts on your performance. If you establish a good relationship with other business through linking, you’ll probably get links on your site in the future. When you link on certain site, make sure it’s relevant to the anchor text and that it’s a well-ranked site. As well, just like keywords, links shouldn’t be overused. It’s much more important to have quality links than quantity. Overusing links also decrease the ranking of the page and SEO performance will be worse.

There are two types of links, follow and no follow links. What are they and what’s the difference between them, you can find in our blog Follow vs. No Follow Links.

When we talk about how relevant links are to anchor text, relevance must be on the highest level possible. Bots are scanning the content and if there is text that doesn’t actually say what link is about, it can be considered as spammy. So, try to shortly explain the link and avoid anchor texts like “read here” or “click here”.

Non-Mobile-Friendly Experience

These mistakes that you have read are the most common in terms of SEO, but SEO doesn’t include only content, keywords, links etc. Important is also an interface that should be optimized for other devices, especially for mobile phones. Searching on mobile phones is the most popular way of using search engines. Today, almost everything you can do on your PC or notebook, you can do on your mobile phones. Therefore, optimize your site for mobile devices because SEO recognizes if it’s not optimized. Otherwise, your SEO rating decreases.

Furthermore, fast loading speed is also something that users like to see. Imagine waiting more than 10 seconds for a page. That’s something that you shouldn’t afford to you and to your SEO. It also impacts your SERP.

Non-Compliance of Analytics

In business, you need to track and monitor everything. So, you need to track your SEO performance and content improvements. There are many businesses that don’t track their SEO performance, but that’s just one of these mistakes. Review your analysis regularly because it presents one of the essential parts to achieve wanted optimization results. Google Analytics is just one of the tools for measuring your website performance and to see how your optimization progresses.

Achieving Good SEO Performance

To achieve the position in search engines that bring you more traffic, the website needs better SEO. Good SEO is hard to achieve but with good skills and experience, it’s shouldn’t be questioned. There are some most common mistakes that are expensive for your website. Using wrong keywords lead to completely wrong direction of the content. Also, overusing keywords is search engines find that as a spam.

Furthermore, irrelevant content, not using title tags, meta descriptions and links, non-mobile-friendly experience, not setting analysis, those are all big mistakes that cost with bad SEO performance. Try to avoid those mistakes and you’ll probably get good SEO performance that will result in better numbers.