1. Ignore Keyword Research
It’s one of the most common mistakes many people do when building their website. They completely ignore keyword research. So, they built a website around keywords that nobody actually searches for or they build a website using the most competitive keywords online. This way it’s very difficult to achieve high rankings on Google and other search engines.
You should use the free Google AdWords Keyword tool and type in a few keywords. Take a look at the results and be sure to pick those keywords who have a good number of searches per month. Also, type your keywords into Google and make sure that you can win the competition and getting your site onto the first page of results.
2. Keyword Spamming
Mentioning your keywords many times on your web page or making big lists of keywords with a font color that is the same as the background color is not going to help your search engine rank. Neither is adding keywords that have nothing to do with the content of your page.
Always remember to concentrate on making your content good for your visitors, not just for the search engines. You do want to mention your keywords in specific places such as the TITLE tag, H1 tag, alt text, etc, but don’t overdo it.
3. Optimizing Only the Home Page
The homepage is often the most important page on your website with the most visitors, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the rest of your website. You have to optimize all the pages of your website. Many people will spend all their time optimizing the home page. But it’s a great mistake.
You have to choose different keywords for each webpage on your website and for each blog post you create. This will enable you to get many times more traffic than you would if you only concentrated on the home page. Even if you choose less popular, less competitive keywords this can have a dramatic impact on your traffic if you have optimized pages on your site.
4. Bad Linking
You have to be very careful about who you link to. Linking to sites that have been penalized by the search engines could have a detrimental effect on your own ranking.
You should be careful about how many links you have on a single page. The Google webmaster guidelines state that you shouldn’t have more than 100 links on a single web page.
5. You Don’t Know Your Competition
Knowing your competition is very effective for your successful SEO strategy. Before you go ahead and optimize a page on your website for a particular keyword phrase you should take a look at the websites that you are competing with.
Enter your keywords into Google without the quotes and take a look at the web pages on the first two pages of results. Most people don’t go past page 2 of the results when they are searching, so you need to be able to compete with the sites on the first two pages.
Are these sites of big companies? Do they have high page ranks? If there are authority sites or popular sites in the results it doesn’t necessarily mean that you cannot compete with them, but you have to understand how much work you need to win them.
6. Poor Navigation Website
Developing a site using a poor navigation structure or using exclusively javascript menus could result in your website not getting fully indexed by the search engines.
Search engines can’t read javascript, so you need a text-based menu. Be careful and ensure that the search engines and visitors to your website can quickly and easily navigate to all the pages on your site.
An easy way to do this is to generate an XML or HTML sitemap. There are many free sitemap generators available on the internet.
7. Backlinks and Off-Site Optimization
One of the things you can not ignore is the off-site optimization and backlinks of your website. This means getting lots of backlinks from related, good quality websites and using your keywords and variations of your keywords in the anchor text.
Building backlinks is the best way to increase your search engine rankings and improve your SEO.
8. Slow Load Pages
It’s a big mistake if you have slow load pages on your website. We live now in the fast online world and if you have not fast load pages you will lose traffic, clients, and money. Also, you will lose high rankings and the first page on Google.
9. Mobile-Friendly Website
The same goes for not mobile-friendly websites. You can not create an effective SEO strategy without a mobile-friendly website.
Now you know the common SEO mistakes and how to fix them. It’s up to you to take action and create a very effective SEO strategy to achieve high rankings and the first page on Google.