Any business strategy cannot be complete without a well-oiled marketing operation. With the technological innovations at hand, different kinds of marketing strategies have been thriving, prominently SEO.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the strategy of improving the performance and quality of a website, by increasing a website or web page’s visibility to users on online search engines like Google Search or Bing.
As SEO is changing constantly, it remains one of the top priorities for marketers as it is a powerful tool to bring consumers to a company’s website.
Due to search engine’s new development and user’s changing perspectives, SEO methods ultimately evolve and marketers have to learn and apply them at a wicked speed. Speaking of speed, make sure you site is loading quickly but using a multiple location CMS if your business is located in different areas.
Nevertheless, it can be challenging to keep up with these updates that alter the optimization techniques and can lead to many businesses to incorrectly use SEO.
Perhaps the most frustrating part about SEO is that no one can predict the outcomes of optimization approaches in real-time because search engines’ rules are always changing.
Even though SEO is ever-evolving, some practices have proved to be quite effective regardless. Yet some tactics have shown to be detrimental in the long run.
Here are five common SEO mistakes any entrepreneur or marketer should avoid:
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing should be avoided at all costs when implementing SEO strategies for your business models.
Keyword Stuffing is the practice of when keywords are simply added to a page and are not followed in context. The over-usage of these keywords can raise red flags and, in effect, make your websites or articles look like spam.
Businesses need to keep in mind that stuffing keywords as a practice was popular in the 1990s and is not common anymore. You do not want to produce an unnatural or bad quality blog by stuffing keywords anywhere.
Rather, you could research the correct keywords and use them appropriately and in the right places.
2. Improper Use Of Anchor Text
Although it is underutilized, the businesses that do practice the use of anchor text often make mistakes and end up affecting their site’s optimization. Instead of linking to other pages on your website with a commonly used anchor text like – “click here”, you get much better results by using specific keywords you would like your website to achieve good rankings for.
Anchor text is extremely useful for SEO because it gets Google’s crawlers involved in the type of content on your website, which then influences your ranking in the search query.
However, when done improperly, an anchor text’s potential and effectiveness is diminished.
3. Inadequate Market Research
As with any marketing strategy, a good implementation of SEO requires a great deal of research. Efficient research is extremely important when it comes to determining a detailed SEO strategy.
You can discover your potential customers’ searches for key phrases and then research the local and national search terms around them using tools such as Google Keyword Planner to gain better results.
Before you start writing, you must conduct a good chunk of research to provide the best possible application of SEO.
4. Bad Quality Or Duplicate Content
First and foremost – the content on your website must be original and top quality to make use of SEO and get plenty of traffic. Yet one of the most common mistakes in SEO is a company publishing unoriginal and poor content on their web pages.
You must think about what search engine bots see when they are present on your website; therefore, your content must be effective in such a way that it resonates with both the search engine crawlers and your actual visitors.
With that in mind, each page on your website must contain no less than 400 words of quality content (700-1200 words is the optimal count), which includes your product and collection pages as well. Suppose you find yourself struggling to produce well-written content that meets these standards. In that case, consider outsourcing to a blog writing service. A professional blog writing service can create high-quality content that meets these requirements, engages your audience, and drives traffic to your website, helping establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Moreover, be sure to avoid duplicating your content on the website. Quite often companies find themselves copying content or publishing general spammy content on their web pages, which is a big SEO mess.
Having the same content on more than one page can and will confuse the search engines, causing your pages on your website to compete against each other, or even worse,
your website will be penalized.The major lesson to be learned is to publish new and effective content for your pages in order to reap in all the benefits SEO has to offer.
5. Broken Links
Not only do broken links seriously harm your SEO, but they also simply annoy your website’s visitors.Common causes of broken links include deletion or moved content, a change in URL structure, and incorrect re-directs.
Some online tools can help you avoid this problem as they help you identify broken links that could be hurting your rankings. Also, you could use tools to identify broken links to your competitors’ sites. From there, you could contact the linking site and suggest they link with your site instead.
While there are plenty of SEO mistakes one can make, there is always more to learn and explore as SEO is always evolving. All of the mistakes mentioned above are commonly made by businesses today.
One thing is known for sure: the power of search engine optimization is stronger than ever and continues to prevail.
Companies should use optimization to their advantage and make sure that their websites are the first ones visitors see within their niche. This can only be done when implementing effective, good, and advanced SEO techniques that will rank your website to every targeted keyword search.
SEO errors and poor practices can ultimately leave your business website buried in search engine searches, which will make it difficult for your customers to find you. While deploying great SEO techniques here and there, it takes years of hard work to develop a consistent understanding and utilization of SEO.
In general, the best advice when dealing with SEO strategies is to stay focused on your goals. Rather than thinking about the shortcuts in the game, keep a more long-term state of mind. Marina Turea works as Content Manager at Digital Authority Partners.
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