We’ve all made search engine optimization (SEO) mistakes. The good news, though, is you can avoid some of the most common ones by reading articles like this one.
If you want smooth sailing during your SEO journey, be sure to watch out for these SEO errors that can send your search engine page rankings into a downward spiral:
1. Attempting “Black Hat” SEO Techniques. By now, you should realize that anything with “black hat” in front of it is bad. Black hat SEO techniques that might have fooled search engine crawlers once, such as having “hidden” keywords embedded into web pages by making them the same color as the page background, no longer work. If an SEO suggestion sounds like trouble, it probably is.
2. Stuffing Keywords Into Your Content. Today’s content is expected to have keywords, but not in every sentence. Great content is readable content, for both search engine bots and human visitors. Content should flow normally, and keywords have to sound very natural. Read and re-read all your keyword-optimized content to ensure you didn’t overstuff it with keywords.
3. Forgetting About Technical SEO. What is backend SEO? It’s SEO that takes place off the page, as in the coding of your website. Search engines crawl the code to find information about your web pages, and if you haven’t told them what the page is about by using meta tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions, etc., they’re going to become confused. Off-page SEO is more technical than on-page SEO, which means you may want to hire a professional to help you get it right.
4. Sending Visitors and Crawlers to Broken Links. When was the last time you checked to see if your links were relevant rather than broken? Whether you’re sending web crawlers and visitors to internal or external links, it’s up to you to make sure they’re always working appropriately. You risk getting on the “naughty” list if you have tons of broken links.
5. Sending Visitors and Crawlers to Bad Links. Did you pay someone to link back to your website? Get rid of those links — pronto. That’s a black hat SEO technique that can land you in very hot water.
You can check to see who has linked to your site using free software programs. If you find that some of the sites that have linked to you are questionable, send their webmasters a direct request to remove the links.
No response after several weeks and repeated attempts? Google allows you to request that links be removed so you don’t get penalized by association.
6. Duplicating Content. Once upon a time, it was considered just fine to duplicate content, especially if you had several items that were basically the same, but needed different web pages. For instance, if you sold blankets that were made of the same material but came in varying sizes and shapes, you might be tempted to just copy and paste the content for each SKU on separate web pages.
Today, this can backfire. All your web pages should have unique content, even if the products are basically the same. Having difficulty figuring out how to do this? A web marketing firm can help with content creation.
7. Plagiarizing Others’ Content. From the time we’re small, we learn in school that plagiarism is a bad move. Yet some websites boldly plagiarize content. Sometimes, it can seem like no big deal, such as “borrowing” language from another site in the form of a few paragraphs. Without permission, though, this is plagiarism, and search engines are savvy enough to find it.
If your face is red with the realization that you have SEO problems on your hand, it’s time to make everything right. Resolving SEO issues isn’t impossible. It just takes some help and a commitment to going forward with better, ethical techniques. Contact a a professional digital marketing agency for more information.
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