The world of SEO is an ever changing landscape that molds the current online marketing world that we live in. To stay ahead of the competition you have to stay on top of the latest SEO trends and that means staying ahead of Google’s algorithm updates.
With their Panda algorithm update in 2011 that penalized websites for a lack of quality and unique content and their Penguin algorithm update in 2012 that punished websites for spreading low quality backlinks, many websites were falling down the ranks at a tremendous rate. Bad link building is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make when it comes to SEO and is a mistake that can be easily avoided. Here are some of the most common mistakes made when it comes to SEO.
1. Bad Optimization
What this means is over using keywords in many parts of the content that you create. If you keyword stuff a title, or use and endless string of keywords in your content, then search engines will penalize your site. Other places that can suffer from over optimization are the header and title tags. Add in too many non quality backlinks and an abuse of h1 tags, and you’ve got a recipe for getting your site down ranked.
2. Unnatural Links
Before anything else, buying backlinks is the black hat way of doing SEO and will just get you in trouble. If you create too many links with the same URL, then you’ll be causing problems for yourself, you should create different links with different URLs to diversify the links that point back to your website. Your home page isn’t the only place for users to visit, link to product pages, your contact page, or your media page. If you build links too fast, search engines will see this as not being a “natural” build of links and you’ll get penalized for it.
3. Bad Backlinks
A bad SEO technique to do is to build low quality backlinks. As mentioned above, Google squashed that practice with their Penguin update last year. Examples of low quality backlinks are backlinks from forums and forum signatures as well as backlinks from guest comments.
4. Failing to Link Internally
As opposed to bad backlinks, internally linking is a fantastic SEO technique that most webmasters don’t use. By using internal linking you can minimize the bounce rate on your website and keep your visitors around longer by providing them with links to related topics.
5. No ALT text with Images
A very common and careless mistake is not placing any ALT text with the images that you post on your site. This is a very important technique to use for SEO as it provides you another place to put your relevant keywords. By using those keywords to describe the image, your image will show up in related image search results. This can generate traffic for your site from a second search results page.
6. Not having Social Media
It can’t be possible for a company to not have at least one social media account in today’s online world. But it is possible for that company to ignore their social media accounts once they have them. Social media is now more important to SEO than ever before as Google has begun using social media activity to rate for SEO. More importantly, social media channels provide you with a place to connect with your target audience, share your content, and help generate traffic back to your website.
SearchPro Systems
2024