Website optimisation is an essential element of small business owner online marketing strategy, as it is a powerful way to bring the potential customer to your sales funnel. However, there are some common SEO mistakes that are hard to avoid because the search engines’ algorithm change frequently. While search engine company, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing adjust the ranking parameter to update the search results, some effective SEO practices will not be correct and lost the advantage in the industry. Let’s review the common SEO mistakes you should avoid so your business’ website will bring the desired results to match your efforts.
1. Choosing the wrong keyword for your business website
Choosing the keyword for the website is important as same as deciding marketing orientation for the business. Once you choose the keywords in the title of the website, that means you send a clear message to the search engine what kind of business you plan to develop.
In this period, one of the most common mistakes is you forget to review the business from the customers’ angle. While you might define your products and services in a certain way, it’s more important to understand what words your potential customers would use to refer to them. Sometimes the terms you consider correct might mean something completely different for other people, or could be too generic. In either case, you will be optimizing for all the wrong keywords.
The best SEO solution for choosing keywords for online business is to research the related keywords carefully before the optimisation. Normally, you should choose the closest keyword of your business, also, the keyword should match your business scale. Longtail keyword can be optimised easily but the result brings less traffic while generic keyword with high search volume requires lots of resources to reach the goal.
2. Try to Stuff more keywords in the content
It doesn’t work today while you try to use the target keywords in every sentence of your content.This old-style SEO skill has been negative factor nowadays. Going overboard with using excessed keywords is registered as spammy by search engines, which means it actually hurts your SEO performance.
That’s why keyword ‘stuffing,’ or overusing your intended keywords, is not crucial to your SEO success. Such an approach would make your content unnatural and useless for its intended audience. In fact, Google is employing a special semantic search called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This program can recognize your content’s topic without the need for stuffing your content with repetitions of your target keywords.
3. The content doesn’t match the keywords
Another common pitfall in SEO optimization is producing content that is not actually about your keywords. The problem is that you want to rank for a certain keyword, but you fail to focus the text on your target topic.
An essential knowledge of SEO is using compelling content to persuade search engine and potential visitors. With the search engines develop themselves for many years, they can identify whether your content is related to the tag of the page title and description. Furthermore, the readers from organic search can represent his opinion such as close the browser or start to search the keyword again if he found the content is useless.
Search engines like Google want to serve their users with the most relevant content for people’s search terms. Thus, if your content does not answer user needs, it won’t rank well.
This mistake is often a result of trying to fit a few different topics within a single piece of content, creating low-quality work just for the sake of including keywords, or optimizing for multiple keywords in one article. Your primary goal should be to produce content that truly corresponds to the questions and needs of your target audience, including using the right search terms. Then search engines will be able to trace your content as matching the keyword you are optimizing for.
4. “Copy and paste” to create your content
Either search engine or readers love new and informative digital content. So copy and paste others articles is harmful to your website ranking.While duplicating texts was a common practice back in the day, today search engines penalize this approach. Copying and plagiarizing content is seen as a spammy practice and is highly discouraged.
Duplicate and thin content simply don’t work. Instead of ripping off a copy from other places or using software that ‘spins’ the content into a new shape, it’s worth investing in creating original and meaningful texts. This is the only way to make sure your website doesn’t get downgraded and pushed in the back of search results.
5. The tag of title and description absence
Informative content is important but sometimes the online marketers miss to add the title tag and meta description which are essential elements of SEO. Skipping them means search engine hard to understand the page content.These optimizing factors are considered by search engines when crawling your website, so if properly done, they can improve the performance of your content.
Another technical detail that content marketers sometimes forget is including image tags. Images use pixel to represent their meaning which search engine can’t understand totally. The alt tags of the visuals you include in your content are important, as they are another sign of how you are targeting articles. Search bots cannot see the pictures – but they can read the alt tags and add this information in the way they index your pages.
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6. Build effective backlinks
Everyone knows backlinks is the most important part of SEO strategy. But few people find the correct way to build strong backlinks. After Google Penguin update, backlinks quality are more important than quantity.That’s why it’s better to make sure you link to relevant, well-ranking websites with solid reputations – not just any site. It’s also useful to link back to sites that have linked to you, as this brings back traffic in the future.
Another counterproductive practice when it comes to links is using ineffective anchor text. This wastes precious SEO opportunities, as the anchor texts signify to the reader and to search bots what the link is about and how it can be beneficial to users. Thus, avoid using ‘click here’ as an anchor text and make sure you opt for a variety of anchor texts, as employing the same text over and over again can be seen as spammy.
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7.Manage the internal links organically
Besides the backlinks from other sites push up the ranking, internal links can provide beneficial reading experience for visitors, such as increasing the session time and page view. How to manage the internal links organically is a challenge for marketers.
As with keyword stuffing, it’s crucial to watch out and not overdo internal linking. If the content and links seem unnatural, the work will not be appreciated by your target customers. It would not be favorably treated by search engines either, as it can be seen as a fraudulent practice.
8. Slow and Non Mobile-Friendly Experience
SEO is a total optimise solution for the website, not only about content and keywords. It’s also about the quality of your website, particularly its performance on mobile devices, which are users’ top choice today. Google and other search engines can recognize when your website is not mobile-friendly.
A smooth mobile experience for your audience can improve your rating on search engines. The same goes for load speed, as search engines put an emphasis on that as well. You shouldn’t be surprised if a slow website leads to lower SERP. You can use online tools like Pingdom and GT Metrix to analyze where the speed problems come from and how to fix them.
SEO is an essential part of any content marketing strategy today. While you can find plenty of advice online, making a number of typical SEO mistakes is quite common. Instead, it’s better to get well acquainted with the challenges that others have experienced and avoided them in your marketing efforts. These eight errors have proven quite widespread, so they are now easier to recognize before you make them.