5 SEO Mistakes
It’s easy to make SEO mistakes and not even know it.
Getting hit with a Google penalty is one of the worst things to happen to websites. A Google penalty means that your site will be pushed far down the search results if it appears at all.
To avoid such a fate, you have to know what SEO best practices are and make sure that you apply them to your site.
Take a look at these common SEO mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.
1. Wrong Use of Keywords
When most people think of SEO, they immediately think of keywords.
They still think that’s the most important factor when it comes to SEO. They’ll stuff their websites with as many keywords as possible and think that will help them improve their rankings.
Keyword stuffing is very 2005.
Google is all about user intent when it comes to search results. User intent is simply what the user is trying to accomplish when they search for something on Google.
For example, there are a dozen ways to find a peach salsa recipe on Google. Some people might look for ‘sweet peach salsa’ others might look for ‘tomato peach salsa recipe’ or ‘peach salsa.’
They’re all looking for the same thing. Google takes that into account when it’s coming up with search results.
2. Not Ready for Mobile
Mobile searches are slowly dominating Google. Just over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.
Google is well aware of this and has responded by rewarding sites that are optimized for mobile devices in search results.
If your site isn’t ready for mobile, you will get left behind.
3. Having a Slow Website
Since so many people are using mobile devices to access information, websites need to be clean and fast.
Google and users expect websites to load within 2-3 seconds. If it’s not fast, users will leave your site before it loads. You’ll also drop in search rankings.
You can test the speed of your website using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool and make the recommended adjustments.
4. Bad Backlinks to Your Site
Backlinks is another major factor in determining search results.
You used to be able to buy backlinks and get to the top of the rankings because all backlinks were treated equally.
The more backlinks, the higher you’d rank.
If you tried to do that now, you’d get hit with a Google penalty.
Instead of buying backlinks, write good content that’s worth sharing. You can also write guest posts for other sites that will link to your site.
5. Your Focus on Search Engines More Than Users
Perhaps one of the biggest SEO mistakes people make is to focus so much on gaming search engines that they forget about their users.
The way that today’s SEO world functions are that if you give your users a great experience, they’ll come back to your site, share your content, and you’ll earn backlinks.
All of these things will improve your search rankings.
Instead of writing for search engines, write for your audience. Provide valuable information that will help them solve a specific problem.
That will keep them coming back for more.
Avoid These SEO Mistakes
SEO is a complex world of algorithms that really can’t be gamed or manipulated.
Focus on providing great content, help your users, and use some the SEO best practices mentioned here.
If you’d like to improve your site’s SEO, contact us today for a free quote.
