SEO is one of the most rapidly growing fields, gathering attention from developers, digital marketer, content creators and website owners. Ideally, it is hard not to love SEO while tools like Serpbook have already made SEO easy for websites by keeping track of SERP after sustained optimization efforts.
Still, anyone, including SEO experts, can make mistakes in practicing SEO, some dire than others. SEO mistakes can be avoided and fixed, but you must identify which ones you are doing. The following will enlighten you on six common errors and a guide on how you can combat them.
Duplicate content
There are unresolved arguments on whether or not Google penalizes duplicate content, which happens to be a common practice, especially for e-commerce websites. Regardless of whether there is a penalty for duplicate content or not, this SEO mistake could cost you traffic flow and reputation.
Duplicate content represents information that users can find elsewhere online. Why then would people opt for yours? Google and other search engines will rank a piece of work for the original author, and the rest of similar content will be displayed on subsequent pages, even the third or fourth, which is terrible for visibility. It can be fatal if you replicate content already posted by prominent websites.
Instead of falling culprit of this mistake, identify unique niche topics in your industry, otherwise, find newer approaches of writing to address the needs of your audience for the same topic areas. Use SEO tools like Copyscape to find out whether the kind of information you intend to share is replicated on another website online.
Keyword stuffing
Keyword research can go so well that you feel overwhelmed over which keywords to use for your website. The problem comes in when you overuse your identified keywords on a copy, which result in keyword stuffing. Keyword density happens to be an important consideration factor for indexing on search engines as well as to audiences.
The way you use keywords on your website communicates how conversant you are with the industry and how much knowledge you have for the identified topic. To avoid getting your site cluttered with too many keywords, choose long-tail keywords that comprise of 4 or more key phrases, which are more descriptive to capture context and intent. Strategically position your keywords on your web pages, H1, H2, meta tags, among others, to create more room for using your keywords.
Overlooking social signals
Social media is quite a large digital marketing and networking platform that can do amazing things for your website’s SEO. Neglecting social signals blinds you to the fact that social media platforms draw massive traffic for your website.
Consider joining a select of social media platforms, among them, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, all of which should be guided by the unique needs of your brand and your target audience. Be sure to consistently share your content with your social media audience and following through with the conversations to optimize audience engagement.
Neglecting mobile
The world is changing and fast. More and more people are transitioning to mobile because it captures the largest population of the internet users. Mobile technology is advanced to perform most duties like computers would, which is why your neglect of mobile is a mistake that could cost you a potential audience group.
Configure your website to befit a mobile site with all the essential information similar to that displayed on your desktop site. Optimizing your website for mobile ensure that it is easy to navigate, open links and images. Consult mobile themes for your site to best represent the needs of your mobile audience
Blocking critical web pages from Google
Some of the pages of your website contain the most important information that could guide your audience and Google to understand better what your brand is. Blocking critical web pages from Google can be accidental or intentional, but either way, affects how your site ranks on SERP, which is very likely during the redesign of your website.
As a rule of thumb, remember to always remove the ‘no index’ tags from the specific pages you want Google to index. You can achieve this better with the help of an SEO tool like Screaming Frog spider that will identify any blocked pages so you can fix them.
Skipping meta tags and descriptions
Upon sharing your content, there is a snippet used on search results for your page’s URL, which essentially is the meta description. Most website owners have great content that very few people get to consume because the meta descriptions are not luring. Meta descriptions are an excellent spot for using your keywords, which necessitates their use.
Audit your website with SEO tools including Screaming Frog so you can ensure you add and edit the meta descriptions for all your pages and content, very briefly to only capture the most critical information.
Whether or not your mistakes are by omission or commission, intentional and intentional, you can now be careful to avoid them, or better still, fix them.
Source: IndianWeb2
