When I first started building websites of my own many moons ago, I read almost everything I could lay my hands on about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I could foresee the importance of search engines then and wanted to be ahead of competition. Soon, I knew by heart the methods needed to improve my websites’ search engine rankings by leaps and bounds, or so I thought.
Unfortunately, not all my websites were able to achieve great SEO as well as I had desired. Some websites were ranked pretty high and were sitting on the first page of search engine results for years; while others did not even make it to page two. Looking back, I saw that I had committed countless mistakes in my quest to SEO my websites. And through the years, I had learned from my mistakes and had managed to put these websites back on track, though it did take some time. Today, I have put together a list of 5 common SEO mistakes to be careful of, that I would be sharing with you, so you don’t have to learn it the hard way like I did.
Mistake #1: Wrong Keywords
Choosing the appropriate keywords is the most important part of the SEO process and yet the most common SEO mistake ever. Most webmasters, regardless of beginners or experts, commit the crime of applying keywords that THEY think best suit the website, instead of what keywords the search engine users pick to look for information offered by these websites. Most of them failed to realize that their keywords are not necessarily the ones that their targeted readers choose to search with. So do ensure that you do keywords research first and one way of doing so is through Google’s free Google Keyword Tool.
A tip here is to concentrate on keywords that have lesser competition and higher monthly searches. This way, you get less competitive sites but comparatively higher traffic, thus elevating your chances of ranking high in the results page.
Mistake #2: Keywords Saturation
I’m sure you have come across some sites which seemed to be saturated with the same keywords. Some webmasters believe that by stuffing the website with the keywords over and over again, the search engines would be able to detect them better. While this may hold some truth few years ago, it is not the case these days. In fact, most popular search engines today would penalize websites that have excessive keywords and poor content.
Regardless of whether it was done intentionally or unintentionally, cramming keywords in the websites or articles should be avoided. Do ensure that you produce quality articles and not quantity keywords only!
Mistake #3: Duplicating Content
Seen an article in another website and think that it’s so well written that you are tempted to just “borrow” it for your website? Don’t even think about it. Not only would search engines drop your site from being indexed but you would also be committing the ultimate crime in writing i.e. plagiarism. It is not worth the trouble.
You may be able to get away with it once or twice but what happens after that? You have to think long term and you definitely have to put in the effort.
It is not easy to come up with quality articles and sometimes you may encountered writer’s block but do persevere through it and your readers will come to appreciate it. So will the search engines.
Mistake #4: Not Doing Any Site-keeping
Like housekeeping, you have to consistently monitor and manage your website’s SEO progress. This is because search engines are changing their algorithms every so often and in order to maintain your high ranking, you would need to constantly put in SEO efforts besides updating your websites.
Mistake #5: Using Black Hat Techniques
Most people are tempted by the less-effort and quick-result offered by black hat SEO techniques like invisible text, doorway pages and overstuffed unrelated keywords. These are short-term and therefore, should be avoided. Bear in mind that search engines are improving their techniques too and will heavily penalize websites found to be using black hat techniques. Do not every use any black hat SEO techniques!
While many knew about the importance of SEO in generating traffic to a website, not many would take the trouble to SEO their websites. But if you are serious about internet marketing, I suggest that you put in the effort to learn more about SEO as well as the above list of mistakes to be careful of. Armed with this knowledge, you would be able to build a great SEO strategy and with some patience and effort, your website would soon be ranking high in search engines results.
Excluding Google adsense in Site , Can We use Black Hat Techniques for SEO
I would agree that no matter how expert we are on SEO, there will always come a time that we commit these mistakes especially with all these sudden changes made by Google. Nevertheless, avoiding these mistakes can free us from Google penalty.
By the way, we also need to get rid of the meta keyword tags and descriptions, non-unique title tags and the broken links. Although accumulating broken links is normal but it’s still best to get rid of them in a timely manner as these can downgrade your site’s ranking. Hope this helps.
I used to suffer terrible duplicated content with my site. The reason was that the technical man did not make www site redirect to non-www site. As the result, I got hundreds of duplicated pages. After fixing the issue, my duplicated content pages nearly went away.
Terrible mistakes. Very nice post.
one que HBB.., my website traffic is good but the Alexa rank is constantantly decreasing. plz tell me is there anything I can do about it.
I can’t really comment on Alexa Rank bro, I don’t really understand their real algorithm. These tips will be essential though mate – http://hellboundbloggers.com/2009/10/26/tips-for-improving-alexa-rank/
thanks pradeep..:)
Alexa Rank Purely Depends on ” The vistors visit your site who have alexa toolbar installed
can you explain how black hat SEO techniques made a wrong impression to search engines ?
Because those methods use illegal ways to reach high rankings bro. Simple. 🙂
Thanks for sharing the useful information. I will make sure not to commit these mistakes. Thank you.
You are most welcome, Imran. Have a great day ahead, and enjoy blogging!
I'd like to add that many of us overlook a good URL and we don't really see how relevant a URL is. There are a lot of SOPs in SEO that we need to consider though.
Keyword Research is really important. You missed competitive research its also important.
Very true, but due to limited space and time, I can only cover so much in this article. I am only providing some general tips, perhaps at a latter time in another post, we can talk specifically about keyword research.
Of course, you can also contribute an article on that topic… would definitely like to hear your views.
The first link Google counts to the home page from this page is "Home"
This would be only Bing optimized tips ….?
Hiya Ira,
Not really, these are general tips which are good for any search engines.
Can you tell the recommended density of keywords? Currently it's 7-8% on my blog!
Normally 1-2% is preferred mate.
For me, 1-2% perhaps is a little too low, maybe 2-3% is fine in my opinion. Anyway, please never go more than 5%.
Yeah these are good tips to remember…I am following these tips……Let see how things goes on…!! I am new to blogging…!
I am learning too… provided we are persistent and willing to learn, it is not impossible to succeed!
We should pay heed to all these mistakes and learn from these mistakes so that we can prevent ourselves from making mistakes. SEO is a very broad subject and any one running online business should know the pros and cons.
Yes, SEO is vital to succeed online these days. You will not go far if you only rely on paid traffic.
All the point are awesome as we make such mistakes and the biggest one is the duplicate content which is a disaster for seo.
Hey Jasmine….
Congr8s for such a nice informative article….
Great SEO Tips
#4 sounds most important to me!
It's a periodic task that every webmaster must do, like taking backups!
Just Few Improvements, Each Time!
Initially, have to avoid duplicate content because its the major mistakes in the SEO part. Those data will be more helpful to all the SEO on here. Thanks a lot for given up here 🙂
Duplicating content is really worst thing in seo.
Yes, you are absolutely right. We should always stay away from duplicated content. Instead, we should work on good quality content.
Hi Jasmine,
You shared good info for how we can get success in our profile of SEO all points are very nice but i like most #1 point this is very true if we will choose wrong keyword then how we will get good PR for our site so if we want to build a strong building for lifelong then we need to create strong base for that.
Yeah, keyword is a vital part of a website. It determines if your organic traffic is targeted or otherwise.
The main and most important thing is keyword research and choosing the right keyword, if you make mistake on choosing good keyword that means high search volume with low competitive keyword, then all other SEO effort are useless.
Nice tips Jasmine. I feel out of all the points that you discussed, the most dangerous ones are plagiarism and black hat seo techniques. Good work !
Will i face the duplicate content issues if 3 different domain but showing the content just the site is targeted different market? is it better that the content not to be same ?
yes, you will get penalized
3 different domains showing the same content? Yes, that could be an issue mate.
You have shared some great tips on SEO mistakes which are so common, that most of us might commit when we are writing for our blogs. Hmm… we really need to be careful not to put too many keywords in our articles, and worse still is to use the wrong keywords! Haha… good sharing!
very nice and informative post 🙂