Avoid These 10 SEO Mistakes If You Want to Rank Better In Search

We all want to rank better in Search Engines to get more traffic on our websites. As this is a common concern for almost everybody, there are lots of discussions going on this topic every single day on and off the internet. In general, a discussion is a good thing, but with information overflow and with false resources, you might face troubles.

In this article, we are going to list 10 top SEO mistakes that you should avoid if you want to rank better in search engine. Let’s get started.

1. Think About Penalty

This is the first mistake that people tend to avoid. There are a ton of Google penalties that can ruin your dream within seconds. Google penalties can come in many different ways. Starting from a simple content based penalty to a backlink based one, and it is your duty as a professional to make sure that you are constantly keeping yourself updated with the recent changes in Google.

2. Mobile Optimization

If your website is not easily viewable on mobile, you will soon receive a penalty from Google. Google has recently decided that they will penalize all websites that are not mobile friendly. Google has also released a tool to check whether your website is mobile friendly or not which you can use to test.

There are rumors that Google might separate their mobile search and desktop search results completely. It is a good time to invest in mobile optimization.

3. Faster Page Loading

Always make sure that your website loads faster than your competitors. A good hosting is often not enough. If any of your webpages take more than 3 seconds to load, you should do your best to minimize that.

No visitor wants to stay on a page for more than three seconds if the page doesn’t load properly. Remember that there are a lot of alternatives for visitors these days.

4. Going after the wrong Keyword

This is a fundamental error that you might make. If you are choosing a wrong keyword to target, the whole effort might get ruined in the process. Unless you are very determined about the keyword that you will have to rank, try to look for easier alternatives. Long tail keywords are always easier to rank than the regular keywords. Try to take that chance.

5. Publishing Content Which is Not Original

If you are not publishing original content on your website, you are waiting for Google to penalize you. Often, Google will not even tell you that the site got penalized. They will simply drop you from the search results to down below. By the time that you figure out what went wrong, it would be too late.

Even if you don’t publish regularly, try to publish original content whenever you do. This will save you in the future.

6. Not Going Social

If you have a website and are not on social media, you are missing out a lot of SEO traction. Google love websites that get a lot of shares on social media. In fact, social share is now considered as one of the major SEO factors for a website. Even if you are building a ton of backlinks, without the help of social media, it will be tough for you to rank your website.

7. Keyword Stuffing

One common mistake that many SEOs make is that they stuff more keywords inside their articles than required. This is a big no if you are working in 2017 and beyond. This strategy used to work well back in the days but since Google improved their algorithm, this is now something that can give you a penalty.

If you stuff keywords in your article, it is easier for Google to figure out what you are planning to do. The best strategy is to be natural about it. Do not stuff your keyword in any website or in any article. Go with the flow and write whatever is relevant.

8. Not Taking Care of Broken Links

Broken links can harm your website a lot. The most common broken link types are 404 error pages and 301 error pages. These are pages that you once had content in or these are pages that have backlinks from other websites by mistake.

Whatever the reason is, your task is to make sure that your website doesn’t have too many of the broken links. Having a few broken link is common for almost all websites but if you have too many, you are going to suffer in the long run.

9. Avoiding Analytics

Google has given us great resources to use for free when it comes to analytics management. Tools like Google Adwords or Google Analytics will tell you pretty much everything that you need to know about your website. Starting from which keywords that are currently ranking to which potential keywords that you should target, the tools says it all for free.

Adwords is more of a paid marketing tool, but it has a few special resources that you can use for your SEO purposes too. The first one being the Keyword Tool that you can use to figure out which keywords to target for your website. Also, this tool will tell you about keyword trends to help you know which keywords are currently on the top.

10. Listening to Too Much Noise

This is the last one on our list. As SEO is a common topic to talk to everyone in the internet marketing world, you will often listen to things which are not true. If you believe everyone and make all the changes that different websites ask you to do, you are going to face trouble. Do not jump into doing anything only because you read it once in a blog. Make sure that you conduct a thorough study before going after any changes. That will save you both time and money in the long run.