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The word ‘SEO’ stands for search engine optimization. Basically, it is a process to enhance the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website from search engines. If one does not have thorough knowledge about SEO, its implementation can be costlier and less effective. This article deals with those costly SEO mistakes to avoid.

Avoid SEO Mistakes

1. Mistakes Related to Keywords

Not doing Proper Keyword research

Keyword research is the cornerstone of on-page SEO. It is very essential to have a better understanding of your target audience and how they are going to search for the content or products that you offer. Moreover, well-edited content without 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 exist over the web for webmasters and content developers which are extremely helpful for finding a proper keyword for relevant content.

Practicing Keyword Stuffing

Keywords are the key factors that play the most important role in ranking, however, overusing them will harm your content ranking in 2022.

Keyword density is the frequency of target keywords used in your content which is often expressed in terms of percentage. As per Google, there is no ideal density, however as recommended by experts, it should not go beyond 2%.

So, if a content developer is injecting a bunch of rich keywords within his content, several times and thankfully, with artificial dexterity, then it is called keyword stuffing.

Search engines are probably smarter than anyone of us and they really know how to fish out naturally built good content among those aforesaid, devalued, keyword-rich contents. So, if you tend to overstuff your content with certain keywords aiming to remain at the top in ranking, it’s time to stop this practice. Try to aim for natural content in order to prove a better reader experience.

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

So, always ‘going global’ isn’t a smart decision where local organic search traffic can boost 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 every content is different, their Title tags should follow the same rules. Unique, relevant title tags paint the first impression on a user’s mind. For a standard title tag design follow these checkpoints,

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

Meaningless Meta Description

The meta description is the little 157 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 boosts the click-through rate of any content. The main checkpoints are,

  • Is it duplicate or the 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 appearing in a search result that links to a page or content are termed anchor text. It’s an important ranking factor as link relevancy is a standard parameter of search engines.

The main checkpoint relating to anchor texts is the content of the anchor text and the content of the document or the page it’s linking. It should always be analogous in nature.

Not Cleaning up Broken Links

Users also don’t like to see 404 or ‘page not found’ errors. Broken links hurt the overall user experience as well as the crawl ability of an entire website. Websites having a large number of pages face this problem regularly. So, it’s important for 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, and Pinterest, have already turned themselves into big marketplaces both for businesses and users.

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

4. Mistakes Related to Content

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

Content Editing

It’s needless to say that, 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 proofreading process is a key to success in this particular aspect.

Irregular Update

The frequency of content publishing affects 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 content 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 are also equally harmful. Webmasters need to locate them and hunt them down in order to get the best user review and a green signal from 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 to us as well. I have figured out some of those mistakes so that you can remain careful to avoid making them in the future:

Don’t target the wrong audience

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 also we do not receive the results as per our expectations. Shoot follow-up emails for a 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 backlinks from 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 backlinks as it might cause a 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 designing the future SEO improvisations of any online business. Added to this, benchmark web and social analysis tools like Google Analytics, Facebook page insights, and Twitter analytics are free to all.

7. Not Optimized for Mobile

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 that 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 the 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.

Conclusion:

SEO is highly crucial nowadays, however, webmasters continue to make the above-mentioned mistakes and incorporate them into their strategy. This results in poor search engine optimization for your website and the website is dropped down in search ranking results. This in turn will make less audience turn to your website and hence your sales will go down.

Hence, by understanding the mistakes mentioned in this article, you can improve your SEO strategy which can help you to grow your business.