Home » SEO Search Engine Optimization » Common SEO Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Common SEO Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Everyone makes mistakes with SEO. Most mistakes are unintentional. Let’s take a look at these common SEO – search engine optimization – mistakes.

Consistency, quality, auditing, relevancy, responsiveness. Make your website as engaging, interesting and informative as possible for your visitors.

The whole idea is to attract visitor traffic, keep them engaged and educated, and have them refer others to your website.

Keyword stuffing is a very common mistake.

Overloading your content with keywords is not a natural read. Relevant keywords used responsibly in your content encourages not only good readability but also raises the bar of interest in what you write. Content is king, content needs to read naturally and content needs to trigger interest. Keyword stuffing triggers serious penalties from search engines so it is wise to avoid this practice.

Duplicate or very similar content in multiple pages tends to split your website ranking potential.

There are legitimate reasons in some cases for this however, and there are ways to handle the duplicate / very similar content responsibly in ways that do not cause search engine confusion and cost your website valuable visibility.

Mobile optimization – otherwise known as mobile responsiveness – is extremely important.

ANY website designer worth their salt knows to check their designs on all devices to ensure the maximum user experience. Any reputable and responsible website designer will check their client’s website design on all possible devices – desktop, phone, and tablet / iPad. To NOT do so is a HUGE mistake.

Not updating your website content – resulting in stale website content – is another HUGE mistake.

As an example that we can all relate to, if you leave bread out for any length of time, what happens? It gets stale. It becomes inedible. It goes in the garbage.

It is the same with one’s website. If the website sits without being consistently updated, it becomes stale and irrelevant. This leads to increasingly lower search engine visibility, allowing competitors to take over your once coveted good rankings, and eroded user trust.

Why? Users want up to date information, articles, blog posts, videos. No one wants to read the same old thing over and over.

I cannot emphasize this enough. Your website content needs to be updated regularly with consistency.

Crafting keyword rich content and relevant, interesting meta titles and meta descriptions is mission critical to your website search engine visibility.

All too many people do not bother with this and just let the page content somehow take care of itself in meta titles and descriptions. These need to be crafted with meticulous care, independent of what is on the page but relevant and related to what is on the page.

I show my clients my proprietary techniques in this area which encourage users to click.

Slow loading pages are a problem as well. No one wants to watch the spinning wheel as a page loads. And, you shouldn’t have to!

Any given website page should load instantly. Your number one objective is to give your users an excellent experience. Server response time needs to be minimized, caching needs to be in place to maximize page load, images may need to be optimized. You do what you have to do to give your visitors the best experience otherwise you will have ridiculous bounce rates and no visitors.

Some of us prefer Google Analytics and some of us prefer Search Console. Either way, for optimal performance, you need to utilize one or the other.

You cannot measure your performance or tweak your overall strategy for improvement without one of them. Personally I prefer Search Console as my clients find it easier and more straightforward to understand and they can relate to it’s direct approach. Use whatever works for you. But use it, otherwise you will find your website falling behind.

Basic maintenance, which in the simplest of terms in basic technical SEO, which ends up being crucial.

Critical components as missing or broken sitemaps, broken links, incorrect usage of 301 redirects, 404 anomalies, and totally incorrect usage of robots.txt can cause crawling and indexing to take a real hit. Which in turn causes your search engine visibility to take a real hit. It is wise to audit your website on a regular basis to be sure these components are not contributing to lower search engine visibility.

A pet peeve of mine in particular is inferior backlinks, unethical and unprofessional spam SEO companies, and supposed “guaranteed” results.

Back in the day, websites linked to each other, sometimes with good results as long as they were quality websites of good caliber.

With today’s ultra-competitive business environment, this practice is long gone. And in my opinion, good riddance.

You will find many unethical and unprofessional SEO companies promising you 100’s of “free” backlinks, instant ranking on page one of Google, and guaranteed ranking.

Be advised that NO SEO PROFESSIONAL who operates ethically and professionally will EVER promise you “guaranteed” results, “instant” results, or 100’s of “free” backlinks!!!

It is much more advantageous for you to build a quality website full of quality, relevant content and utilize internal linking responsibly, thus building up your link quality. And if you have several business websites, link them together. This takes more time, however, and builds you a quality reputation in the search engines.

Maureen McCullough LLC is headquartered in Hackensack, Bergen County NJ.

We are in business 20+ years with an A+ Better Business Bureau rating.

Call or text us today at 201.753.1677 or 201.523.4332 for a FREE 15 minute SEO consult.

Back to SEO Services