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29 May 2015

Top 7 Costly SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Top 7 Costly SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid
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By Amit Kothiyal

Top-7-Costly-SEO-Mistakes-You-Should-Avoid

The word ‘SEO’ stands for search engine optimization. Basically, it encapsulates a bunch of techniques which make any content more visible to search engines. But, it’s way more than it sounds. SEO is a costly business when it gets implemented without a complete knowledge about it. This article deals with those costly SEO mistakes to avoid.

Avoid SEO Mistakes

1.Mistakes Related to Keywords

Not doing Proper Keyword research

Keyword researching is the corner stone of on-page SEO. Moreover, a well-edited content without having proper keywords is like having a guitar without strings. It’s useless as search engines will fail to target that content and will not be able to deliver the same on its search result page when users search for it.

A bunch of standard keyword researching tools exists over the web for webmasters and content developers which are extremely helpful for finding a proper keyword for relevant content.

Practicing Keyword Stuffing

Once, Matt cutts was asked by a webmaster, what is the standard amount of keyword density in a rich content? Is it 0.7%, 7% or 77%? He gently replied with, why are you concerned about it? Go natural.

Personally, that answer was smart. Honestly, if a content developer is injecting a bunch of rich keywords within his content, several times and thankfully, with an artificial dexterity, then it’s called keyword stuffing. This smart idea of including a sea of keywords within a content to make it rich for the search engines bots it’s not that smart anymore.

Search engines are probably smarter than anyone of us and they really know how to fish out a naturally curated good content among those aforesaid, devalued, keyword rich contents. Moreover, keyword stuffing kills the flow of a content and decidedly, interrupt the readability of the same.

Finally, when SEO is concerned, keyword stuffing is not treated like an honest mistake. Rather, it’s treated as an organized crime.

Ignoring Local search

    • For Google, last year had been the year of redefining local search for them. Supporting this vision, Google launched some major service and algorithm updates. They are,
    • Local search algorithm Pigeon on 24 July, 2014 for a better display about the businesses or services of your neighborhood.

google business

  • New service tool ’My Business’ for putting in the right data about your business coherently, on Google Search, Maps and on Google+.
  • A new version of the Google Maps for displaying any business’s  presence on the map including the route direction to that, Physical address, contact info and user’s reviews and ratings.

tisindiaSo, always ‘going global’ isn’t a smart decision where, local organic search traffic can boost up a business. Finally, if any business has not yet optimized itself for these local search ranking factors, unknowingly, it’s ignoring a large chunk of users.

2.Mistakes related to Other SEO fields

Misleading Title Tags

By definition, title tags are the concise description of the content of a page. As each content is different, their Title tags should follow the same rules. Unique, relevant title tags paint the first impression on a user’s mind. A standard title tag design follow these check points,

  • Is it telling about the content it’s targeting?
  • Is it unique for every page?
  • Is it containing the complete information about the type and location of a business?
  • Are relevant search keywords included in it?

Meaningless Meta Description

Meaningless Meta descriptionMeta description is the little 155 words snippet text area on the SERP, which describes the main story of the linking content in an abbreviated way. To the webmasters, it’s their advertising area for any content. An apposite meta description gains the trust of the users and boost the click-through rate of any content. The main check points are,

  • Is it duplicate or same for every web page of a website?
  • Does it contain all the necessary information about the content for users?

Anchor Text

The clickable text appear in a search result that links to a page or content is termed as anchor text. It’s an important ranking factor as link relevancy is standard parameter of search engines.

The main check point relating to anchor texts is the content of the anchor text and the content of the document or the page it’s linking. Is it analogous?

Anchor text

Not Cleaning up Broken Links

Users, also the search engines don’t like to see 404 or ‘page not found’ errors. Broken links hurt the overall user experience as well as the crawlability of an entire website. Websites having large number of pages face this problem regularly. SO, it’s important to a webmaster to search for broken links and fix them as early as possible.

3.Mistakes related to socializing

It’s really a no-brainer. To remain alive and to grow on the web, socializing is the ultimate tool. Social communities like, Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Google+ has already turned themselves into big market places both for businesses and users.

So, to generate leads, to attract fresh users and to turn them into dedicated customers, a business’s presence on every social surfaces is a bottom line requirement.

4.Mistakes Related to Content

For any content developer, it’s prime to mother sterling and compelling contents for turning heads towards its contents and further, towards its business. For generating and delivering a good content, a clear content strategy is required. These following checkpoints related to content generation can clear the mist.

Content Editing

It’s needless to say that, a good content is the result of a good editing process and that includes rectifications of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and improper punctuations within the content. A multilayer proof reading process is the key to success in this particular aspect.

Irregular Update

Frequency of content publishing effects and affects the overall search ranking of an entire website. To stay alive for the search engines as well as for the users, publishing quality contents on a regular basis is pretty handy.

Duplicate Content

Plagiarism is a sin and search engines hate sinners. Moreover, duplicate contents published from the same website is also equally harmful. Webmasters need to locate them and hunt them down in order to get the best user review and a green signal form the search engines.

A bunch of standard tools and plugins are available on the web for this workaround.

5.Mistakes Related to Link Building

Running and managing link building campaigns requires proper strategy formation, outreach, research and memorizing what to do for the success of these campaigns. However, we often commit some common mistakes while running link building campaigns that are unidentified for us as well. I have figured out some of those mistakes so that you can remain careful to avoid making them in future:

Don’t target wrong audiences

It is necessary to recognize and build our link building strategy to target the right audiences to get the potential responses.

You are Not Sending Follow Up Emails

Often we send emails to our existing and new target audiences with attractive offers and discounts, but then we did not receive the results as per our expectations. Shoot follow up emails for few days to get positive responses from your audiences and don’t give up sending follow up emails until you have a response from them.

Receiving Back Links from Irrelevant sites

Always make sure to get links from high PR sites. Don’t receive back links from the sites that are not associated with your business to add more relevance to your PR.

Avoid buying or selling links

It is better to avoid buying or selling links to get back links as it might cause ban on your site on popular search engines. Instead, post high-quality content on relevant blogs for acquiring natural links for your site.

6.Staying Away from Analytics and Webmaster tools

If the budgeting of success is not tracked then, the very purpose of investing efforts to achieve the same is defeated. If one is happy seeing only the growth of his online business without knowing the root cause of it then, it’s sure that the success will be a short-lived one.

Proper measurement of progress is the key to design the future SEO improvisations of any online business. Added to this, bench mark web and social analysis tools like, Google Analytics, Facebook page insights and twitter analytics are free to all.

7.Not Optimized for Mobile

mobile friendly test

On February 26, 2015 Google announced that they are launching a fresh search algorithm update for specifically, mobile internet users. Google confirmed that starting from April 21, 2015, they will count the mobile-friendliness of a website as a ranking factor.

Plainly, websites who are responsive in their web design or optimized for mobile devices will get a higher rank in the search results for mobile web searchers. If you are a webmaster and you don’t want to disregard users who are searching the web from their smart handhelds then following checkpoints should fall within your ‘must do’ section.

  • Go for a ‘Mobile-Friendly Test’ offered by Google.
  • If a Webmaster Tools account is associated with your website then, from there, you can check your entire site for mobile-friendly issues.
  • Go through the official mobile-friendliness guide by Google for deeper issues.

These aforesaid points deal with some of the basic yet costly SEO mistakes a webmaster should avoid.

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