3 Common SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

If you have an online business, there is no getting away from the fact that SEO is one of the most important aspects of any website. No matter how innovative your company is or how cutting edge your products are, your sales and overall revenue will remain in the toilet unless you can achieve a high search engine ranking. Some businesses desperately try and use illegal black hat techniques. While they gain instant gratification in some cases, search engines always catch up with them and eventually penalize such websites severely. Using black hat methods is clearly an SEO mistake and here are some others that must be avoided if you want your company to succeed and be seen online.

Ignoring Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text you see in hyperlinks on any web page. If you want to experience high rankings you need to build anchor text links on your site. Anchor text helps search engine spiders understand what a particular page is about. As search engines view clarity of content favorably, it goes without saying that anchor text is necessary for a better SEO ranking.

An example of anchor text is NFL and this leads you to nfl.com. You should also pay attention to the words which surround anchor text. Having 'NFL' anchor text in the middle of an article about knitting will show search engine spiders that the anchor text is actually irrelevant. You should always have a handful of anchor text phrases in mind which relate to keywords you will be using on your site.

Lack of Patience

Contrary to what some get-rich quick schemers tell you, getting to the top of search engine rankings and staying there takes time. For example, you may have 50 anchor text links while your competition has 4,000 on average per website. Clearly, it's tempting to play catch up and add hundreds of links overnight but this doesn't help your SEO ranking. If you do so and fly to the top of the rankings, you will not be ready to stay there. You should focus on increasing your current links by around 20% a month. As you will be creating a relatively small number of links, ensure that they are all relevant. You'll find that many of your competition's 4,000 links are irrelevant and don't rank on search engines.

Poor Link to Content Ratio

While it's important to have a large amount of rich content, this will not do your site much good unless there are an equally huge amount of links coming into your website. Lack of inbound links equals a lack of traffic which renders the content irrelevant. Search engines take into account the number of links coming into your website and compare it to the amount of content you have on the site. Websites with a low link to content ratio will not rank well. Therefore, build links along with your site's content to ensure a greater level of traffic,

While there are a myriad of SEO tactics that can be used to boost your search engine ranking, you should be looking for longevity and stability rather than a meteoric rise to the top of the rankings which you can't possibly sustain. Learn from the above mistakes and give your company a fighting chance of being successful.

Jason Kay recommends reading SEO service reviews to help you choose the best SEO service for your needs.