It can be difficult to keep up with the most effective search engine optimization techniques. A high SEO ranking is the goal of any business with a web presence. With the optimization field continuously evolving and hard to predict, we’ve come up with a list of common SEO mistakes and how you can avoid them.
Publishing Non-Original Content
Duplicating content is a great way to get your website pushed to the bottom of the search results. You may fool readers, but you won’t be fooling Google. Instead create original content. Original content isn’t just a great way to rank higher but also can increase credibility amongst industry leaders.
Original content doesn’t have to be new content. If you can structure existing information in a new way or apply it to a different industry you’ll have created original content. Think about your audience and keywords when coming up with an original idea for you next post.
Keyword Stuffing
If your content reads like a broken record, repeating the same keywords over and over, you’re going to get penalized by search engines. Google uses a search called Latent Semantic Indexing to recognize topics, making repetitive target keywords useless.
Your website copy should flow properly and be conversational. Don’t let bad writing knock you down the ladder of results pages.
Choosing the Wrong Keywords
When creating content about your products and services you’ll want to think about what words potential customers use to refer to them.
For example, If you’re company is selling carbonated beverages you’re going to want to use a geo-targeted keyword planner to decide whether to use the term “soda” or “pop”. Using tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Google Trends can put you on the fast track to using the right keywords.
Not Optimizing Your Site for Mobile
Content and Keywords are just one part of the search engine optimization battle. Your website’s user experience factors into your ranking also.
With the majority of Americans now owning smartphones, it should be mandatory that your website is optimized for mobile use. Also, more page visits will increase your SEO rank.
Allowing Your Sites Page Speed to be Slow
A slow website=low search engine results page ranking. If your website takes forever to load you’ll not only frustrate customers, but your SEO ranking will be lower.
Google deploys web crawlers to gather information on websites across the web. These “spiders”, as they are often called, analyze your site page by page. They then relay the data they found back to Google for search engine purposes. If your site is slow, it will hamper the web crawler’s efficiency and lower your search engine ranking. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to analyze your site speed.
