Creating a website for the business is not enough anymore! You need to do a lot with your websites like deciding the best domain name and domain registering services. Figuring out the layout and design, writing the pages, and whatnot. With all this, we come across many people that tend to forget or do a poor job addressing search engine optimization (SEO), and some ignore Search Engine Optimization mistakes completely. With all this, we come across many people that tend to forget or do a poor job addressing search engine optimization (SEO), and some ignore Search Engine Optimization mistakes completely.
We personally recommend website owners, especially those with business purposes, to make SEO their highest priority. Search engines like Google and Bing have sophisticated algorithms that determine where your site ends up in a user’s search results. If you have a high rank, your location will be listed next to the top. If your site has a low row, the link to it will be buried in one of the following pages. For business owners, it is important to throw everything in their stride and try to rank as high as possible in SERP since higher ranking means more traffic and that translates to better chances of conversion.
But remember, digital marketing is evolving at a rapid pace, you must focus your strategies to stay ahead in the game as it has never been more difficult. Competition is endless, what has not changed is the fact that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) still plays a vital role in making sure that you achieve your goals.
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How To Be Successful In SEO
In order to be truly successful, you need a strong SEO strategy that is integrated with the marketing with your online marketing. This requires constant process performance analysis and content optimization.
What we have noticed is that many marketers are avoiding the hard work and switching to affiliate marketing as it promises quick gain for the business. In fact, recently many marketers have made a switch to affiliate marketing for quick money. What they forget is that it is not a true replacement for SEO.
The main reason for this shift is that SEO is a tricky game, it is getting tougher and tougher with each algorithm update. You need to put in a lot of effort to master it! Since SEO is competitive and challenging, all the SEO errors you make not only waste your time but also harm your business. Many brands found themselves penalized by Google for not implementing SEO properly. Here are 6 common search engine optimization (SEO) mistakes that you need to stop immediately.
6 Common Search Engine Optimization Mistakes To Avoid
POOR OR NO KEYWORD RESEARCH AND OPTIMIZATION
Determining your concentration keywords should be the first step in creating your search engine strategy. Although this may sound fairly simple, many marketers and brands still struggle with it.
When the concept of SEO was quite new, optimizing your content for keywords was quite simple. In order to rank high marketers used to stuff the keywords no matter if the keyword was in context or not. This was a fairly successful trick among the marketers in order to push their rank high and high.
Everything comes to an end and so does this unethical practice. Google soon realized this practice and started penalizing the websites that followed this practice to rank higher in SERP by using their Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Stuffing your content with specific words has become unnecessary, and worse, potentially damaging. If Google gets you into the law, your page might be banned from the search engine altogether.
You should start by selecting keywords that have little competition, but high search volumes. This ensures that a decent number of people seek them out, but they are not used by many of your competitors. You may want to use tools such as Moz Keyword Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, or KeySearch to find the right keywords.
Finding the right keywords is an important part of SEO taking the time to look up your keywords will help you distinguish your brand from your competitors.
SLOW LOADING WEBSITE
There is no getting around the fact that every business absolutely needs SEO but if you have not followed the news on grading factors, you may not be aware of the necessity of speed. Google has repeatedly said that “site loading speed” is one of the key factors considered for ranking. Furthermore, it has become a ranking factor in mobile searches.
Think about yourself, would you love to keep waiting till the website loads for the information you need on the go? Your visitors won’t either wait till your website gets loaded, they will simply hit the back button and choose the next website that will help them with the information s/he needs.
Don’t forget your organic visitor is Google’s user also, and Google always wants to provide the best experience to its user. Slow-loading websites provide a very bad user experience and affect your conversion too.
So if you haven’t checked your website loading speed, don’t wait to use Google’s very own PageSpeed tool to know your website loading speed for desktop and mobile and optimize the website to make sure that your website loading time is lightning quick!
NOT OPTIMIZING FOR MOBILE
With the power of the Internet in our pockets, today’s consumer is empowered to make informed decisions right from the start, without having to go to your store or speak to a seller. Your website is your best seller, available around the clock, 7 days a week, for your potential customers. But if it is not user-friendly on the appliance that the visitor is most likely to use, your website is no good for him/her.
Visitors are using your website only for a reason- your content! But when your prospective customers experience poor layout, frustrating browsing, and images that don’t load, they are likely to bounce away from your page.
With so many mobile users, it’s imperative that Google prioritize the devices most of its visitors use. Google has even begun mobile-first indexing. This means that Google’s algorithms are mainly using the mobile version of your website to rank it within the search results.
With mobile users growing significantly every year, it’s a good idea to optimize your site for mobile. Ensure you create an adaptive website. Not only is it easy to handle, but also one of the best SEO-friendly solutions. You can use Google Mobile-Friendly Test to test your website and determine whether it should be improved.
NOT MIGRATING TO HTTPS
Technology has evolved such that the implementation of encryption at your site is now easier than ever which was difficult in early times. This is due to many things, including faster servers, an affordable and easily implemented SSL certificate, and better protocol mechanisms. It is not only e-commerce websites that need it. Implementing an SSL certificate is very much important in this age and time when people are concerned about their safety and security.
Now, aside from merely rewarding sites that migrate to HTTPS with better rankings, Google’s own browser extension will call sites that are not on HTTPS. From July 2018, Google will mark all “HTTP” sites as “not secure” in Chrome.
The idea behind the migration of HTTP to HTTPS is to make the web a more secure place. This guarantees that your personal information remains private and is not misused by others.
USING SPAMMY RICH SNIPPETS
Structured data or rich snippets are blocks of information-rich content that provide additional information on a webpage without clicking on them. If you are using the spammy Stucture data snippet then you must need to avoid this search engine optimization mistakes.
Adding wrong structured data (to act as clickbait) or using fake rich snippets is against Google’s structured data guidelines and may cause your search rankings to fall significantly. If your structured data is not relevant to the website, then Google has the right to take manual action against those pages and delete their structured data from the search results.
The path to properly used tagging data is easy, but you must do your work first. Read the Google documentation, search the forum for advice, if you have problems implementing the schema.org. Follow Google guidelines and mark content properly. Next, wait until Google reads it and decide if it will go live or not.
HOLDING BACK ON TRACKING YOUR WEBSITE’S PERFORMANCE
Essentially, by having the analytics present on the data tracking website, you are taking a big step forward in refraining from SEO errors on the page that people are making. If you do not regularly track website performance to find out what works and what does not, you will be unable to provide your visitors with the best interests or understanding of the user’s intention.
As a digital marketer, I always recommend website owners to use Google Analytics as it is one of the best free software tracking packages. By using this powerful statistics program, you’ll be able to monitor the number of visitors to my site, page views, search keywords, and many more. Having this important information in hand enables you to take certain specific measures on my website to ensure that it meets the needs of visitors.
CONCLUSION
Spammy SEO practices may look tempting at first but can harm you in a bad way. It is always a good option to stay clear of the bad practices as Google doesn’t care about the rank, trustability, or even reliability of your website. Google will penalize your website if caught using unethical practices to rank high in SERP.
To prevent this:
- Conduct regular verification or analysis of your website.
- Keep control of the type of links you get or offer.
- Google’s disavow tool to block all suspicious backlinks
- Keep track of your website traffic/click rate by using Google Analytics or Search Console.
Finally, retain unique, helpful, and optimized content.
Now apply all this techniques in your business SEO and avoid above search engine optimization mistakes.
