What are the most common SEO mistakes?

Most Common SEO Mistakes

You may have the most amazing website in the world, but without SEO optimization it will fail to bring the results that you are looking for. Hence, understanding and implementing SEO is the ultimate marketing discipline in today’s digital world that you need to follow. However, trying to keep up with the ever-changing search algorithms can be difficult and in such a process there are high chances to make some blunders that can hurt your search rankings rather than boosting them. These errors need to be quickly rectified and fixed in time in order to avoid the loss that you can suffer after your ranking is dropped.

Hence, Jacksonville SEO Company has listed down some of the most common SEO mistakes that you need be aware of and has even provided some tips to help you avoid them. Have a look.

1. Not investing in a mobile-friendly experience

With the increasing number of mobile users, optimizing your website for mobile devices is a must now. Plus, with the introduction of the mobile-first index, Google can easily recognize when your website is not mobile-friendly. Hence, offering a mobile-friendly experience has become crucial for businesses now to generate success with SEO. If you fail to do so your ranking on the search engines can be jeopardized.

Here are some tips that can help you build a mobile-friendly website.

• Use a responsive WordPress theme
• Choose a reliable web host
• Improve your site’s loading time
• Enable accelerated mobile pages (AMP)
• Test your site with Google’s mobile-friendly tools
• Optimize the text size and font of content in order to make it easily readable on mobile devices.

2. Skipping title tags and meta descriptions

When it comes to optimizing your website with SEO, title tags and meta descriptions play an important role. Along with the other major major ranking factors, even both factors are considered by the search engines when crawling your website. If done correctly, they can greatly help you improve your content’s performance and boost your rankings on the search engine results page. But if you skip them, it will be like missing a huge potential for your content because without a title and meta description search engines struggle to understand the context of your content. Thus, lowering your rank in typical searches. Hence, make sure to write appealing and eye-catching meta titles and descriptions for your page.

Here are some tips to do so:

• Write unique and short titles of around 50 to 60 characters that are brief but descriptive.
• Include your primary keywords in your title tags.
• Make sure that your meta description is relevant to the content of the page and clearly tells the users as well as the search engines what your page includes.
• Limit your meta description to a maximum of 160 characters.
• Incorporate your keywords while writing your meta description.

3. Creating the wrong type of content

Google always prioritizes its users and always wants to serve them with the most relevant content for their search terms. Hence, it always prioritizes the websites with relevant and high-quality content when ranking them on the search engine results pages. Thus, creating content that is not about your audience is the most common pitfall in search engine optimization. Hence, make sure that you build content that answers your users’ needs to rank well.

Consider these tips for creating the right type of content:

• Research what your audience wants.
• Don’t try to fit different topics within a single piece of content.
• Make sure that you don’t use multiple keywords in one article.
• Only focus on the content for the right audience.
• Produce content that is authoritative and trustworthy.
• Write content that clearly answers the queries people are searching for.
• Create multiple types of content such as visuals, video as well as text.
• Naturally, insert the appropriate keywords and their synonyms through the content.
• Don’t publish duplicate or plagiarized content.

4. Not building high-quality backlinks

With On-page SEO, Off-page SEO is also crucial for boosting the rank of your website. Hence, creating backlinks simultaneously while optimizing your site for on-page SEO is a must. However, it is important to consider the quality of links over their quantity because only linking to relevant, and well-ranking ranking websites is beneficial for SEO. It will also be useful to link back to the websites that have already linked to you in order to bring back the traffic in the future.

Here are some tips by our experts from Internet Marketing Service, that can help you build high-quality backlinks:

• Submit your site to start-up directories.
• Build backlinks with infographics by submitting them to infographic submission sites that have good domain authority.
• Create interactive content such as quizzes, and polls and post them with the link of your website to generate a ton of authoritative links.
• Consider guest blogging.
• Build a relationship with media and bloggers.
• Check for broken links and fix them.
• Build E-A-T quality content that attracts links naturally.

5. Forgetting image tags

A website with great images is always great and is engaging to the users as well. However, these images are invisible to the average search bot. Hence, including an ALT tag on every single image on your website is a must to ensure that it is searched and indexed by the search spiders it will help the search bots to understand what they are crawling.

The following are some tips on how to include an ALT tag for your images:

• Don’t stuff your keywords into the alt tag
• Make sure to include a meta description that clearly describes the image.
• Include the keywords only if they are relevant and appropriate to the image.
• Be specific and succinct while describing the content of the image.
• Don’t start with “image of” or “picture of”
• Never add text to the images just for decorative purposes.

6. Stuffing your content with keywords

Whenever you are writing a piece of content ensure that you just don’t write for the search engines but also for your audiences as already discussed above. Keywords definitely play a major role to help the search engines to understand whether your page is relevant to the user’s queries or not. However, it is essential to place them properly throughout your content to make it user-friendly. Or else, users will leave your site immediately by getting frustrated with too many keywords incorporated irregularly and irrelevantly in the content.

You can place the keywords throughout your blog naturally with the help of the following tips.

• Insert only two to three keywords in the first 150 words of your content,
• Make sure that you include your primary keyword in the last paragraph of your content.
• Make use of synonyms to avoid the repetitiveness of keywords, especially for the local keywords. For example, if your keywords are “Jacksonville SEO”, you can use “SEO Company in Jacksonville” instead.
• Keep your keyword density as low as 7 to 8 %.
• Don’t force your keywords in the content.

Conclusion:

Search engine optimization is of course an unmissable part of your digital marketing strategy and the most important aspect to help you rank your website higher in the search engine results pages and gain a huge amount of traffic. However, with so many tasks associated with it such as keeping up with the changing methods of how consumers search or what keywords they are using now, and coping with the continuously evolving search engine algorithms, you unknowingly make some mistakes that can hamper your rankings on the search results. Hence, it is better to get well acquainted with such mistakes in order to avoid them while optimizing your site for SEO and we hope that this blog will help you with that.