6 Common Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

Many companies are guilty of implementing bad SEO campaigns and not understanding what a good campaign should look like. This article identifies some of the common errors in SEO that many companies fall in to.

1. No keyword research

It is very important to do keyword research to find keywords that are relevant to the content on your site. Many people go into choosing keywords to target in SEO blindly. If your content doesn't support the keywords that you are targeting, Google will see this and won't reward you for those keywords. Make sure that the keywords that you choose to target are relevant.

2. Keyword stuffing and poor on site optimization

Keyword stuffing is a tactic that use to work, but is no longer a smart idea. Keyword stuffing is a way of optimizing the content on the site by repeating the keyword phrase too many times. While it is beneficial to have the keywords in the content, over stuffing the keywords can be harmful. Google may even blacklist you for keyword stuffing. When putting your keywords within your content, make sure it reads naturally and it is simple enough for anyone to understand.

3. Not diversifying external links

It is best to have a well-rounded and natural looking link profile. Make sure that your back-links come a variety of directory websites, relevant blog posts, press releases, articles, blog comments, forum comments, and various social media platforms. If you have the majority of your links in just one place, they will most likely lose credibility from Google. You should have links with different anchor texts that are linking from different domains with different page ranks pointing to various pages on your website. Make sure that your external links don't only link to your homepage.

4. Poor internal linking structure

If you have a poor internal linking structure within your site, you will most likely have a high bounce rate. If you link relevant pages together it will help you reduce your bounce rate, and readers will continue clicking through to read more on your site. Google likes it when readers spend a lot of time on your site.

5. Duplicate Content

If you don't have original or quality content on your site, Google will penalize you. After the Google Panada Update in 2011, Google has been coming down even harder on sites that are not providing original content. Please make sure your product descriptions, service descriptions, and all other material on your website is your own, and you have not copied it from anyone.

6. Not being patient, or not maintaining your SEO process after you have achieved your desired goals

You have followed all the rules and began a well rounded SEO process. You get frustrated because you don't see any results immediately. SEO takes patience and you have to be willing to wait for the results. If you have implemented a great keyword strategy and have a nice SEO campaign laid out, you need to follow through with it. It is important to continue your off site optimization through link building on a monthly basis in order to achieve and maintain great rankings. If you achieve the rankings that you desire and then you quit your SEO cold turkey, plan on seeing your rankings drop.

Jackie Myers is an SEO Indianapolis specialist who enjoys keeping up with the faced paced world of search engine optimization.

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.