5 Things You Shouldn’t Do for Your SEO to Succeed
Search Engine Optimization has become one of the most important marketing strategies that any business must keep in mind for their digital success. A business’ efforts in gaining a top placement within search engine results pages is one of the most relevant results for certain keywords.
Many businesses are already learning how important it is for their company’s marketing efforts, prompting them to start on it ASAP, while some are refining their strategies to stay on top of the game. However, any business can make mistakes that hurt their SEO efforts.
Here are the 5 things you absolutely mustn’t do for your SEO efforts to succeed
- Use the Wrong Keywords
People nowadays search in a highly-specific manner in order to get the best results for the type of inquiry they have. These translate to long-tail keywords that many businesses unfortunately skip out on in favor of other keywords that may be shorter or more generic. The problem is, if they become too generic, then it gets lost in translation, or worse, buried under more competitive search results. In order to avoid this, you need to consider what words and phrases that your potential audience is looking for, and would use to refer and find you.
- Not Using Keywords Correctly
Google’s algorithm changes have made it so that overuse of keywords can also hurt your chances of getting higher places within search engine results pages (SERPs) as much as not using them would do. While it’s generally advisable to include a few keywords in your website or content, you run the risk of using too much in an effort to make search engines pay more attention to you or for you to show up more within a certain keyword. Search engines also register them as spammy content, which will hurt your SEO performance.
- Not Having Proper Content
Content marketing has dominated in recent years, and yet marketers still sometimes commit the mistake of writing them without keeping in mind the keywords that they need to include in order for them to be considered as a relevant result for a search engine inquiry. This is especially important if we consider the fact that search engines are designed so that results that are most relevant depending on keywords and quality of content (and of the website) are shown first and ranked as a more important result. Having discord between you and your keywords will ensure that you won’t rank well.
Plagiarism is also something of a sensitive issue with Google’s algorithm ranking system. Copied content is seen as spammy and won’t be considered as worthy consideration or result for users searching under a keyword umbrella.
- Improper Usage of Links
Using quality external and internal links are important as they not only serve as signals for the audience to deem your content to be authentic, well-researched, factual, and informative, but it also gets you some good points in your SEO strategy. Avoid using links that are hardly connected to the topic or content at hand in order to seem credible as these are taken into account by search engines and audiences in evaluating the quality of your content. Likewise, the quality of the external or internal pages you’re linking to should also be taken into consideration.
Anchor links should also not fall prey to being too repetitive – they need to serve their function of letting audiences know what sort of content they are about to click on. Too much repetition of the same anchor text will be seen as spammy and can guarantee the same reception of search engines towards similar events such as repetitive keywords.
- Ignoring Optimization
When it comes to your content, using keywords effectively and smoothly is not the only factor to consider. You can further strengthen your SEO efforts by using title tags and meta descriptions to your advantage. Not doing so is a huge missed potential for your content. Media tags are also important as search engines cannot identify elements within media such as pictures and video, but they can identify their descriptions on your tags.
Your website must also be optimized for mobile browsing because more and more people are turning to their handheld devices over computer units. A website that is difficult to navigate through or read on a mobile device can hurt your SEO in terms of your traffic. This is especially crucial as Google has, in recent years, focused its attention on mobile comfort for its users, and ranks mobile-optimized websites higher on their page.
Committing these mistakes does not mean the end of your SEO success – they are just inconveniences that you will eventually overcome. Truth be told, they are quite common among many industries and business’ marketing efforts, and recognizing these mistakes is the first step in remedying or avoiding them altogether.