This is a checklist for top SEO mistakes you may be making. You might think you are doing everything right in your search engine optimization and yet there are some mistakes that are going unnoticed and actually affecting your business. If you feel like there is just something amiss about your website optimization, you might be making one or more of these top SEO mistakes that are holding your business back, so read on.
Targeting the Search Engine over People
During SEO, many people forget that their website is supposed to be visited by people and not search engines, so when they write content, they write for the search engines. The thing is you can do it so well and even find that your site is ranked really high, and yet you are not getting conversions.
The problem here usually is that you may have inserted keywords that stick out like a sore thumb and in the end, the search engines will pull your site in the results but when people click on the site, the content does not flow and you end up with high bounce back rates which will eventually affect your business.
You should counter this by reading your content over and over again to ensure that it flows instead of stuffing it with Keywords and ending up irritating the reader with repetition.
Broken Pages are not Fixed
Simply put, broken pages are pages that do not exist. This may sound like there is nothing to worry about, but the problem comes when these non-existent pages have backlinks that are redirecting traffic to them.
Say, for example, you decide to delete a page because it has no relevance anymore to your business, but you have some other websites that still have the backlinks to that page. When someone clicks on that link, they will be directed to a broken page and this will affect your business and SEO ranking. Sometimes, it could be that the URL was mistyped and again the traffic will be sent to a broken page.
The remedy for this would be to look out for such backlinks that are directing traffic to non-existent pages on your website. If possible, hire a professional to deal with broken pages on your website.
Not Including Alternative Text for Images
Images need to be optimized and adding alt-text is the best way to do that. Search engines do not only pull text, but they also pull images in a search but if there is no alternative text for your images, the engine cannot know what the image is about so you will miss out on the chance to appear in a search result.
You can use alternative text to describe the picture as well as to include keywords for better SEO. Go through all your images to ensure they have descriptions included.
Poor Quality Content
This should be obvious, poor quality content is certainly going to make your website irrelevant. If you have content that is duplicated, the search engine will see no need to rank your site and it will not appear in searches. Sometimes this is also referred to as “thin content” this is common for sites with lots of pages and you find the content just does not match the size of the website.
It is important to go through the painstaking task of ensuring that every page on your website has unique content that will stand out and ensure you appear in the search results and get better ranking. If you are running an e-commerce website, you will need to ensure you are not making this mistake as it will affect your business more.
Forgetting Social Media Sites
It is very easy to end up concentrating all your SEO efforts on your site and forget social media as well. Your social media site though has the ability to increase the amount of traffic to your website. Links to your website can attract people to click on them and that will improve your SEO ranking.
Whenever you update a page on your website, it is advisable to provide a link to it on all your social media accounts. You can even have this automatically linked so that every time there is new content on your website, it is updated on your social pages as well.
Also, do not forget to use sites like Google My Business which can get you into searches for local businesses.
Trusting Techniques That Have Not Been Tested
It is very common for a site owner to come across an article that promotes a new technique for better SEO and they choose to use it based on a theory that has never really been tested. In this case, your site becomes the guinea pig for this theory and it could fail or succeed, but you may not get to notice that it is holding your business until much later on.
You need to be cautious about some of the theories you will find on Google. For example, you may be told that Social Media will not affect your site’s ranking but research has shown that social media does direct traffic to your website and this obviously will affect your ranking.
The remedy for this is to resort to a scientific approach to techniques for improving your SEO ranking. Test theories before you embrace them.
Impatience
You may implement a number of tried and proven methods to improve your SEO, and then you expect to see results immediately. Waking up the next morning and expecting to see your page at number one is only going to lead to disappointment. SEO takes time — the measures you take today will take some time before you see the full impact.
Be patient and continue to do the right things as you watch your site rise and do not lose faith.
Final Advice
If you have identified a mistake you might be making, it is important to immediately address it before it gets any worse. Also, it is advisable that you do not over complicate the entire SEO process, stick to the simple things that have been proven to work.
