Do You Make These 5 Common SEO Mistakes?
Your content marketing strategy is very important if you want to make the most out of your website or blog. The use of SEO is frequently changing, but you can stay updated to make sure you’re doing things the right way. It’s also important that you’re not making one of the most common SEO mistakes.
This will ensure that you are still generating plenty of traffic and leads. Let’s talk about the five most common SEO mistakes that people make, and we’ll discuss how you can test for these different approaches.
If you notice that you’re making many of these mistakes, there are plenty of changes that you can make which will help steer your website back in the right direction.
1. Utilizing the Wrong Keywords
A large part of SEO content is the different keywords that you select. While you might think a keyword that you’ve chosen is a good idea, there are plenty of keywords that just don’t get the job done.
Just because you would associate certain words with your business doesn’t mean other people see it that way. You want to think closely about the commonly used words that people would use to describe your business.
There’s a fine line you don’t want to cross between being descriptive enough while remaining general to some degree. You can use a variety of tools to help you with your keyword selections. Some of these tools include SEMrush, Google Trends, and Moz Keyword Explorer.
2. Avoid Keyword Stuffing
We’ve all come across at least one article on the internet that is stuffed full of keywords. The content often doesn’t even make sense. Just because you have a lot of keywords, that doesn’t mean you’re going to generate more results.
There are search engines that will penalize your website if they determine that you’re spamming everybody with certain keywords. It’s important to choose a few keywords that are very pertinent to your website or business. These keywords should be sprinkled through your content. Just don’t throw them into every sentence.
You still need to worry about readability and the flow of content. Depending on who is writing the content, some people find it easier to work the keywords into content after the topic has been covered thoroughly. Other people like to keep some keywords on standby while they write.
When they feel it’s a good spot to include those keywords, they can be naturally added to what is being talked about.
3. Irrelevant Content in Relation to Keyword Choices
Setting the appropriate keywords is important, but it’s very important to think about the type of content that you’re going to be writing. The keywords should be very relevant to the overall topic of an article.
You don’t want to squeeze keywords into an article that is completely irrelevant to what you’re trying to trigger on a search engine. You want to make sure that your content is satisfying the needs of your client base. Otherwise, you won’t be happy with your rank on the internet.
Try to answer potential questions that your clients have. Avoid SEO packages that are low in quality. The overall quality of a piece really matters in relation to your business practices.
4. The Dangers of Using Old Content
The quality of your content is important. How current your content is matters as well. Don’t try to duplicate text that was used on your website for a few months or years ago. Don’t try to use content that was used on another website, whether you have permission or not.
It’s been proven that duplicated content doesn’t work when it comes to SEO practices. Invest the time and money that is needed to generate brand new content each time you post something. Otherwise, you could be faced with having your website falling lower and lower on the search engine results list.
If you can’t come up with original content at the moment, it’s better to leave your website alone until you can get something new added.
5. The Lack of Reputable Links
External links are a good way to increase the quality of your SEO content. The problem is, many people use irrelevant links or links to very low-ranking websites.
While there may be plenty of links included in a piece of content, a lack of reputable links can result in poor search engine results. Don’t forget about the anchor text that you’re using. You want to avoid saying something along the lines of ‘click here for more information’.
The goal is to anchor anywhere between three to five words. Make sure those words are keywords or very relative text. Be sure to alternate between different terms or words for your links. Irrelevant links would take someone to a different area of a site that doesn’t have much to do with what was being spoken about.
It immediately becomes obvious that you were just trying to generate traffic somewhere. You weren’t trying to provide good information that people would find useful.
If you want to find out more about the performance of your website, you can use Google Analytics or a variety of Google Webmaster Tools.
These types of tools will allow you to see how your website is doing, how your SEO is working and you can come up with different strategies that will be useful to improve your results over time. Search Engine Optimization is an imperative part of content marketing these days.
You might feel that you have a good grasp of what this is all about. In reality, you could be making some of the most common SEO mistakes around.
You can use this list to make sure that you’re doing everything necessary to generate maximum traffic to your website. This will translate to the better business overall.
