Since SEO is complicated for beginners bloggers, it’s easy for them to make huge and dangerous mistakes that hold their sites back here are the most common SEO mistakes you should take care of them:
#1: Target Keywords without Analyzing
“Hey, there is a keyword with thousand monthly searches …. let’s rank for it”
That’s one of the biggest and most common SEO mistakes that most webmasters fall in. Choosing keywords without research or analyzing it, will waste your money and time as well.
Doing proper Keyword Analysis will eliminate wasteful time, increase conversions, save your money and find more long-tail keywords that bring more quality traffic.
Trying ranking for certain keywords without knowing the competitors whose control of this keyword is completely worthless because what is your chance to rank for a specific keyword that holds with high authority sites? it’s not zero chance, it’s big fat Zero.
So, start your keyword research now before trying to rank for it which lead for more success to your site.
#2: Ignoring Meta Tags (Titles and Description)
“Users already visit my site, why i have to bother myself with meta tags?”
Actually, without an optimized title and description, users won’t be interesting to visit your site because this is what generates snippets preview in search engine results.
Relevant meta title tag and unique meta description will provide the right information for users and search engines crawlers to know what is your page about. You should add unique meta description and titles for each page to prevent duplicate content issue and give your site more clean, neat and well-organized structure.
#3: Image Alt Text
“My images describe everything, why i have to add image alt tags for each one?”
Images can generate huge traffic from Google images search, but crawler bots are not human to understand the meaning of your image. So, you have to help search engine crawlers to understand the significance of your images by adding description text to your images.
Also, choosing descriptive name of your image will increase the presence of your image in Google images searching because it will give more understanding for Google spiders about your image idea like the following example:
<img src="kids-toys.jpg" alt="Kids Toys" />
#4: Analyzing Competitors
“I don’t care about my competitors, I am in good position”
Sooner or later, one of your competitors will take your position for specified keywords. What you will do then?!
Here is some reasons for your competitors success:
- Writing more useful and valuable content
- Offer free products to get high reputation
- Have more presence in social media than you
- Get more powerful and natural backlinks from high authority websites
Semrush is one of the best online tools to check your competitors keywords rank, position changes, backlinks and anchors txt used. Once you analyze their organic search positions, you will be able to write a good plan for to what do next for more success as they did.
#5: Broken Links
“I don’t have time to check broken links, i have to write unique content as more as possible”
Broken links, missed images, and server errors will hurt your site’s rankings because it negatively affects user experience.
It’s very useful for SEO optimization to eliminate all dead links (internal and external or outbound) in your pages to have a clean and perfect website.
Once you check your site for broken links, you will be shocked by the number of dead links you have that damage your site without your knowledge.
#6: Lack of Maintenance
“My site works fine that way, i don’t have to make any technical optimization”
Developers don’t make updates just for fun. They make updates to fix bugs, add new features, increase performance, enhance security and get more compatibility with other plugins or software that you have.
#7: SEO is Continuous Work
“I already did SEO last year, I’ll take care of my SEO later”
Internet marketing is a very competitive place that’s why SEO is not a one-time-big-fix. If you want your site to survive all the time then you have to keep working on SEO optimization according to the world changes around you.
Here is the 5 Top Reasons for Continuous SEO:
- Changes in Search User Behavior
- Continuous SEO Maintains Your Page Rankings
- Your Competitors Continuously Perform SEO Too
- Search Engines Continuously Change Algorithms
- Establishing You as an Authority in Your Business Niche Takes Time
#8: Buying Huge Server without Page Speed Optimization
“I bought huge server, why i have to bother myself with page speed optimization”
Page speed is one of the top important ranking factors in 2015 because its increase users pleased as well as search engine. Sites load faster and will get more conversion rate, increase crawl rate, higher indexing, and more traffic.
You have to dig deep to find out what is slowing down your site and who is ruining your page speed because a big server won’t help you if you have a lot of blocking Javascript and CSS resources above-the-fold area.
#9: Thin Content
“I will hire freelancer to write 10 blog posts daily to get higher rank faster”
Writing huge content doesn’t mean a better website. Superior, outstanding, in-depth, and informative posts will give you a better rank and get more social shares and likes because your visitors like them so much.
It’s better to write one killer post a week and promote it wisely than write ten thin posts overstuffed with many useless keywords.
“Content is the King” is already been old sentence because it doesn’t matter how much content you have, but how much it helps other people.
#10: Mobile Friendly Website
“I have big authority site and my visitors love it, i don’t need mobile site”
Its already announced by Google that an optimized mobile site is one of the important ranking factors because mobile devices and smartphones became the most wanted target audience in the past five years.
Visitors now spent more time on mobile than on other devices because it’s cheaper than before, that’s why mobile advertising has incredibly risen over the last few years.
#11: Caring about Building High Number of Backlinks
“I made 1000 backlinks yesterday, wow i will rank higher soon”
This is the most common fatal SEO mistake because a backlink is a signal from other sites that point to your posts and pages. So, it must be natural not just looks natural to avoid any Google penalty and losing precious ranking. Your backlinks should come from relevant, trusted, and authoritative sources.
#12: Duplicate Content
“I add unique content, i don’t have to check for duplicate content”
Duplicate content doesn’t mean you publish the same post twice, it means you have the same titles or description for many pages like Tags, Categories, Author archive, and Paginate pages which will make your site looks very poor and worthless.
WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast will help you to get rid of duplicate content issue easily by simple configurations steps.
#13: Social Media is not Important
“Social media has no impact on SEO or rank higher in search engines”
The relationship between social media and SEO is real because social signals (Share, Like, Retweet, and G+1 Plus) are very important for ranking in search engines.
No one can deny that social network websites are very authority sites and getting natural steady backlinks from them will increase your website’s reputation. So, start publish your content on social media now to get high benefit from their massive traffic.
#14: Avoid Keyword Stuffing
“I found 100 phrases keywords to place it in my post to rank higher”
Repeating irrelevant keywords in your page is the most dangers SEO practice that will hurt your ranking because its against Google Guidelines:
“Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.”
#15: Stealing Content
“I found a good blog post in my Competitor’s site, i will post it in mine to get more traffic”
Google can easily detect the original author of the content and will penalize your site badly if he catches you with stolen content. Also, most webmasters now learn more ways to protect their content and take down the stealer content by Google DMCA Report.
Instead of stealing others’ hard work, write your own unique and informative content to get a higher reputation than more traffic and success for your site.
Hint: You can check if your content has been stolen or not by Copyscape tool
Conclusion:
When you fall into one small mistake, it would lose you the traffic that you gained through your hard work. So, don’t focus on one way and leave others’ ways abandoned.
If you have any suggestions or questions, just write a comment below and i will be so happy to assist you as soon as possible. Don’t forget to share this post on social media networks to help others.
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