When you’re running a business in a digital age, you have to think digital. And if you’re thinking digital about your business, you have to think about a website. Having a website is a must to take your business forward during such times when majority of the audience are present online. However, only having a website is not going to help your business. You need to ensure that people, especially your target audience, visits it. For this, your business website needs to rank high on search engine results. You can do this with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, it’s extremely important to avoid the common SEO mistakes.
Here’s a quick look at some of the SEO mistakes you must avoid to ensure that your website performs well.
Using Irrelevant Content and Links in Guest Posts
Are you using guest blogging to spread the link of your website?
Guest blogging had been in vogue for a long time as a great way to spread links. It has been an integral part of all SEO efforts. However, it is not yielding as great results as before.
Does it mean that guest blogging should not be used at all?
Actually not.
Did you know?
Brands that use blogging as a marketing strategy generate as much as 67% more leads that those who don’t.
However, for quite some time, with too many emails and unnecessary links, guest blogging was taking the shape of spamming. Hence, it’s important to get rid of irrelevant links and product quality content in the guest posts. Only then you can expect guest blogging to do stuff for your business, which you want them to.
Using Anchor Texts with Keywords
Optimized anchors are no longer relevant. In fact, using them can lead to penalties from Google.
Earlier, anchor texts that contained the targeted keywords were quality popular among the SEO experts. Such anchor texts were used extensively to help sites rank high.
Google, however, was not impressed with the technique. So, they warned against such uses in their Link Scheme document.
Google said:
“Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”
Among the examples, they have added the following:
“Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.”
Therefore, if you’re still using optimized anchor texts, you must stop it immediately.
Creating Low-quality Backlinks
Sharing links is extremely important in SEO, because your site’s performance depends on the number of backlinks it has from other sites, right?
This in fact is wrong.
It’s not the number, but the quality that matters. If you’re focusing on link building, it can have negative results. Your site can have low Domain Authority (DA). Therefore, the sites that have maximum backlinks are not necessarily going to have higher rankings any more. The Penguin Algorithm update by Google has changed it all. It’s important to have links that are relevant. Having irrelevant links is an extremely common SEO mistake.
Stuffing Content with Irrelevant Keywords
Keywords are extremely important for any content to be relevant in SEO. However, it’s not the number of keywords that matter. If you’re stuffing your content with keywords, which are not relevant to the content you’re creating, Google will penalize your site. The long-tail keywords are mostly penalized. Therefore, it is important to use the right kinds of keywords in the right intensity in your content to help your site rank high.
Focusing on the Number of Pages Rather Than Their Quality
How many pages does your business website have?
This question used to be relevant and significant even a few years back. This is because, the more number of pages a website had, better its chances were at ranking high on keyword search results.
For example, Wikipedia, with large number of pages, usally appeared high on search engine results.
This, however, has become obsolete. No matter how many pages your website has, they are not going to count if the content is not of the highest quality.
Therefore, it’s extremely important for your site to focus on the quality of the pages instead of the quantity.
Conclusion
Ensuring that your business website ranks high for search engine results is important. However, you need to ensure that you avoid the common SEO mistakes and implement SEO perfectly.