SEO is a great way to increase your website search visibility but proper SEO is very important. SEO mistakes influence your search rankings, traffic, and conversions. Also, the site does not rank in SERPs.
This article will tell you what are the 29 most common SEO mistakes to avoid.
SEO is very important for any blog. It plays a vital role to increase your ranking and website traffic.
This post will help you to find and correct SEO mistakes that are preventing your site from getting high traffic.
Search engines are constantly becoming smart and the user’s perspective is also changing. As a result, SEO optimization is continuously evolving. In which many users do some SEO mistakes by over-optimizing.
Brief Descriptions of The Content
Most Common SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid
If you have a site and do not have much knowledge about SEO, then these are some things that you can go quickly and see for yourself.
Furthermore, If you have an SEO consultant, you can find out if they are doing SEO properly or hurting you.
Here are the most common SEO mistakes that every user must avoid.
Choose Wrong Keywords
Choosing the right keywords for your content is very important. It helps your content to get top rank in the search engines.
But many website owners or bloggers fail in this process. They do not choose the right keywords for their content.
If you write on a topic, first try to find the right keywords. Here is a guide – How to Find Best Keywords for SEO
Apart from this, you have to pay attention to keyword competition, bid value, search volume. And for this, you can use the Keyword Planner. You can also use Google Trends, SEMrush, Answer the Public, Ahrefs and Moz’s Keyword Explorer to find the best keyword.
Although there are many new bloggers who do not research the keywords before writing the article. Just imagine the keywords and start writing articles.
If you are doing this too, then this is the biggest SEO mistakes. You need to pay attention to it.
Not Researching Long Tail Keywords
When you optimize your site with long-tail keywords, you get a good result and competition is also very low. There are many benefits to using long-tail keywords. Above explanation is not enough.
- It is easier to rank
- Helps to get target traffic
- Better conversion rates
- With long-tail keywords, you can rank on short-tail keywords
- Perfect for Competitive Niches
Here is a detailed guide on how to find long-tail keywords and use them
Using Keyword Without Variations
This is often done by many bloggers who use only one target keyword in their whole blog posts.
This is absolutely wrong.
Use target keywords with variations. This SEO technique helps your content gain a higher rank in the search result.
Search engines use target keywords, related terms, keyword variations, and synonyms to understand your page topic.
If you want to find good keyword variations in your content, use this method.
- Visit Google
- Type your target keyword
- Scroll to the bottom of the page, here you will see excellent keywords to include in your content.
In addition, you can use Google Auto-Suggest. Just enter your main keyword in Google search. This will start showing related keywords. As you can see in the screenshot below.
After selecting your keywords, you can use any of your favourite tools to check their search volume and competition.
Keyword Stuffing
If you put keywords in your content everywhere and think that your content will rank well in search engines, then you are absolutely wrong. It is a bad SEO technique and belongs to Black hat SEO.
In fact, more and more use of the keyword will be seen as a spammy content by search engines, which means it actually hurts your website SEO.
Therefore keyword stuffing does not boost the rank of your content. It makes your content unnatural and also put terrible user experience on visitors.
Publishing Non-Original Content
Non-Original content stands for duplicate and spins contents (copying from other locations or produce using software).
If you publish duplicate and spins content on your site, then search engines will penalize your site and even blacklisted.
Copying and plagiarizing content is seen as a spamming content and it is highly discouraged by the search engine.
Duplicate and thin content don’t boost your website ranking. This further reduces your site ranking.
If you are using this kind of strategy, then it is your biggest mistake, you should avoid it.
Always write quality and unique content. Google focuses more on quality content and provides a top rank in the search result.
Blog Post Under 1,000 Words
If you think that writing short content can increase your search rankings then you are completely wrong.
Short content does not perform well in Google search results. Google looks at short content as thin and underdeveloped content. You can read on SearchEngineJournal – WTF Is Thin Content? (And How Do You Fix It?)
Google does not give value to short content and looks at the lack of quality in such contents. Also, think that it can not solve the reader’s problem.
Long-form content gets higher rank compared to short-form content in search results.
Backlinko analyzed 1 Million Google Search Results, Long-Form Content Ranks Higher in Google’s Search Results Than Short-Form Content.
Therefore, start writing long-form SEO content with high-quality information that can answer the user’s question.
Over-Optimize Content
Content optimizing is very important, but over-optimizing makes your content useless. Google never ranks such content.
There are many bloggers who over-optimize the content to create SEO content and it is against the Google search engine.
Therefore, when you create SEO content, take care of both human readability and search engines.
Not Optimizing Title & Meta Descriptions
Title and meta descriptions play an important role to increase click-through-rate (CTR) on your content. These two things are a very vital part of SEO.
If you do not optimize it properly, then you lose the opportunity to increase your content potential. Here is a guide on How to Write Catchy Blog Post Titles to Get More Click
Not Optimizing Images
There are many content writers who forget to include alt tags in images. Search engines do not have the ability to read images but can read ALT tags to determine what an image is.
Use the correct name and alt tag for your image, this makes your article more SEO friendly.
And one thing, if you use a lot of images on your blog or website, resize and compress them. This reduces your image size and improves your site load time.
Not Performing an SEO Audit
SEO Audit of your website is important for many reasons.
SEO audit gives a better insight for your website, individual pages and overall traffic. And helps you make good decisions.
So guessing what error on your site, it would be better to do an SEO audit.
Forgetting to Make Your Site Faster and Mobile-Friendly
Fast Loading and Mobile-Friendly both are Google’s ranking factor.
SEO optimization is not limited to just content and keywords. It also depends on your site’s loading speed and mobile-friendly.
The reason more than half of the search done on smartphones. That’s why mobile-friendly is important SEO ranking factor.
Google and other search engines prefer mobile-friendly for better user experience. To check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not, you can use Google’s mobile friendly testing tool.
The same goes for website loading speed, Google and other search engines gives more importance to the fast loading site. Here is the ultimate guide on how to reduce loading time of website.
You can use a speed checker tool like PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom and GT Matrix to check your site speed.
Buying Backlinks for Your Site
The link making process is called backlinks. It is a very old ranking factor that Google and other search engine use.
If you buy backlinks for your site, It refers to bad SEO techniques and you may face Google Penalty because such backlinks contain low quality and pornographic sites links.
Make backlinks from relevant and well-ranking websites. Here is the ultimate guide – How to Build Quality Backlinks in 2019 (Updated)
Not Using Social Media Interactions
According to SEO, after publishing an article, sharing on various networks is very important. This step belongs to off-page SEO.
Simply put, promoting your site is called off-page SEO.
The main goal of sharing your content on social media is to attract the attention of users and search engines. Also, you can read an article on Search Engine Journal The Power of Influencer Marketing and the Lessons They’ve Taught Me
If you promote your blog content then it will quickly accelerate your blog traffic. Apart from this, you can build a community and fan followers too.
Use Bad Permalinks Structure
If you start a blog on WordPress, its default permalink structure is not SEO friendly. And look like this:
https://example.com/?p=123
Don’t worry, WordPress allows you to choose a permalinks structure according to your needs. It comes with 6 different URL structure. I will recommend you to use the ‘Post Name’ Permalink Structure.
Ultimate guide – What is Best WordPress Permalink Structure for SEO
Use Non-SEO Friendly URLs
If you use long URLs or non-SEO Friendly URLs for your blog posts, then it affects the SEO performance.
Make your URLs short and search engine friendly. Also, do not forget to include targeted keywords in your URLs.
Always avoid such URLs,
https://justbrightme.com/p=123
https://justbrightme.com/5/10/17/category=SEO/of-page-seo-best-web-optimization
Always use such URL like this
http://justbrightmr.com/page-seo-techniques/
Here’s a guide on How to Create SEO Friendly URL.
Avoid Internal Linking
Many bloggers ignore internal linking and miss out SEO benefits.
Internal linking is an important part of SEO. It improves website ranking, pageviews and decreases your website’s bounce rate.
Here are some of the benefits of internal linking:
- Make your posts more informative
- Internal linking provides a better crawling and indexing experience to search engines.
- Increase older post rank and pageviews.
- Reduce bounce rate
Choosing Wrong Hosting
If you choose the wrong hosting, then your blog will be mostly in downtime and will load very slowly. This will greatly affect your site ranking and SEO.
There are many hosting companies in the market that promise to be the best but after purchasing the hosting from them you will feel that they have cheated you. Here I have listed some of the best web hostings that you can use.
Not Updating Old Articles
At the beginning of blogging, while writing content, you may have made grammar, spelling and some SEO mistakes. If you want to get rid of them, you should update them.
Also, Google likes fresh content and fresh sites rank better. You just need to update your old blog posts with the latest information and latest keywords. Here’s an ultimate guide – Why and How to Properly Update Old Blog Posts
Ignoring Broken Links
Broken links are such links on your site, that does not exist and when visitors click on it, they show a 404 page not found error.
It greatly affects the visitor’s user experience and also hurts site rankings.
If you are a WordPress user, there are many ways to fix broken links. You can use a plugin or a third-party website.
When you find a broken link, update with a similar content link. If there’s nothing similar, you can just delete the link.
Fixing or deleting a broken link makes the page more valuable in Google’s eye.
Indexing Category and Tag
If you allow indexing category and tags, they can cause duplicate content in search engines. As a result, both your traffic and ranking may decrease.
Always set no-index for category and tag.
Indexing Author Archives
If you are running a single-author blog, set no-index for author archive. Because there will be similar content on both author archives and homepage. This can cause duplicate content issues on your blog.
Not setting Nofollow for Affiliate Links and Untrusted Links
Affiliate Links and untrusted links can hurt website SEO. So, always set rel = “nofollow” tags for affiliate links and untrusted links.
If you use the plugin to manage your blog’s Affiliate Links, you can easily set the No-Follow attribute for your affiliate links. Here is a guide – How to Make Nofollow Links in WordPress
Not Using Well-Coded and Fast Theme
There are thousands of themes available for WordPress. All of them are not well coded and do not provide fast loading. If you install such a theme on your site, it greatly affects your website SEO. Here I’ve listed Best SEO Friendly Themes which you can use.
You can install premium themes from Mythemshop, Themeforest and StudioPress on your site which are well coded and speed optimized. If you have a low budget, use a free theme like GeneratePress or Astra.
Not using HTTPS
Google now wants a secure web. That’s why it is using HTTPS as a ranking factor. HTTPS sites get better rank in SERPs.
If you still use HTTP for your site, then move it immediately to HTTPS. Here’s a guide – How to Setup Cloudflare Free SSL for WordPress Blog
Not using Cache Plugin
As I already said, “Speed” is a ranking factor.
And a cache plugin boosts your website loading speed. It generates static html files from your blog and serves that file instead of heavier and WordPress PHP scripts.
A lot of caching plugins are available for WordPress. But W3 Total Cache is the best plugin in all of them that comes with features such as page caching, browser caching, object caching, database caching and minification. Alternative you can use the WP Super Cache plugin.
Use only one cache plugin on your site. Multiple cache plugin can arise new bug in your site.
Not Using 301 Redirects
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. It sends site visitors and search engines to a different URL and maintains SEO value.
When you delete any of your content and do not set the redirection for that, it is a big SEO mistake. This damages your site authority and traffic.
Therefore, set 301 redirects for them with similar content.
Not Using Webmaster Tools
By adding your website to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can find out valuable Insights of your website such as Crawl errors, Ranking Keyword, impressions and more.
Also, if any error occurs on your site, both will notify you. Here is a detailed guide on how to use Google Search Console effectively
Not submitting Sitemap
Sitemaps contain the URLs of your website. It helps greatly to crawl and index your website’s content better.
But to submit a sitemap, you must first verify your site in Webmaster Tools.
If you are already using Yoast SEO or Jetpack on your site, they allow you to easily create XML Sitemaps. Here’s a guide – How to Create an XML Sitemap
Not Creating Engaging Content
This is one of the major SEO mistakes that can kill any successful website.
Always try to create engaging content (informative and creative) that grabs the audience’s attention and force them to share it with their friends.
This type of content drives more traffic and leads to a higher conversion rate.
Here I told you about 29 most common SEO mistakes. If you want to rank higher, then just avoid them.
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Dharmendra Kr Singh says
very Good Information about SEO mistakes.