With the advent of the Internet, competition between companies has moved to another level. There are billions of websites offering the same services/products and targeting the same audience. This highly competitive online landscape has increased the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) like never before. Nowadays, SEO is an indispensable part for the success of any business. It increases search engine ranking, targeted traffic flow and sales of your business. However, many businesses fail to reap the benefits even after implementing SEO. Consequently, practicing SEO is essential, but knowing the common pitfalls to avoid is even more important. Below are some of the most common SEO mistakes businesses should avoid:
1) Duplicate content:
Although content is one of the key elements that improves search engine rankings, if the content found on the website is duplicated, there is a serious penalty. Duplicate content is the same content used on different pages of the same website or on different websites. If you have two pages on your website based on one topic and targeting the same keywords, it is better to combine both pages into one. Alternatively, write original content for both sites. The problem with duplicate content is that it confuses search engines which pages to index. In addition to original web content, meta tags, meta description and title tags should also be original. To avoid penalties and to verify that the content you post is unique, submit the content to plagiarism checking tools such as Copyscape, Copysentry, and Plagscan, among others.
2) Stuffing keywords and irrelevance:
Since the main job of SEO companies is to rank your business higher on specific keywords, some of them fill in keywords throughout the site and related article pages. More importantly, under the pretense of gaining high search engine rankings, such companies engage in unethical SEO practices such as: B. Targeting keywords with irrelevant content. In an attempt to mislead users and search engines, Google penalizes the site as a spammer, which is a major blow to their business.
3) Automated link building:
Link building services are one of the essential SEO tactics that boost web traffic and improve search engine rankings. However, links created through automated directory submissions, social bookmarking submissions, and article submissions do more harm than good. Although there are many websites that offer thousands of submissions at extremely affordable prices, they are unreliable as they prefer spam over manual submission. Therefore, while manual article and directory submission takes time and effort, it is more reliable and preferable to automated link building.
4) Over-Optimize Keyword Anchor Text:
While optimizing anchor text is vital, over-optimizing can severely hurt search engine rankings. Using the same keyword anchor text to build backlinks will undermine all your efforts as search engines would consider it spam. SEO companies should embrace variations in anchor text by rotating and mixing keywords to avoid being flagged as spam.
So, if you are already doing SEO for your website but cannot rank higher in search engines, the above could be SEO mistakes that you may be making.
