Companies invest hours time and money in designing websites and campaigns. If SEO is the prime strategy to drive traffic to your website you have your work cut out. Companies may deploy the best content team, do your keyword research, put the best of design and images to work hoping for thousands of visitors to your page. But if all this fails to produce the results expected, then see find below some common mistakes that damage your SEO efforts.
- Content purely based on Keywords
Keyword stuffing a underhand tactic to fill the website with unrelated content in order to manipulate site rankings in Google search. Lack of quality content might drive webmasters to fill the website with such content meant to drive for search engines. Sure, your site might get the initial hits, but the rankings are soon bound to drop. Google also uses LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), which searches synonyms for keywords in the page, to throw results on a search. Overuse of certain words may drop the rankings of the website during search.
- Plagiarised or repeated content
Plagiarised content is the worst SEO hara-kiri that can undermine your website rankings. Be sure to find your website on second/third page or worse Google may even de-index the site. Also, care must be taken to avoid repeated content in multiple locations on site. It is imperative to create relevant content to make each page interesting and unique. SEO audits must be done at regular intervals to check any case of copied content. Better to be alert especially if the case is that other sites have copied yours.
- Lack of Analysis to see conversion rates
Having spent hours on designing and executing a digital campaign, a follow-up analysis is imperative to see the success rate. One of the biggest SEO blunders is not measuring the data post campaign. It shows lack of business objectives. To measure which phrases are driving results, one must set conversion targets and monitor at regular intervals. Configure Google Analytics and Google webmaster to analyse the data in detail.
- Commonplace title tags and use of meta tags
Focussing on meta tags are a things of passé. Meta tags provide quick information about the site and helps when the search engine crawls and indexes the page. But Google ignores meta tags it does not know, so too much effort there may be wasted. However, title tags are displayed everywhere, especially when bookmarking a page or in shared tweets. Design a unique and persuasive title tag with important keywords, especially for SEO purposes. Do not ignore URL’s. Keywords in URL also give additional advantage during a search.
- Nondescript links
Broken links bring negative feedback to the site from viewers as well as the search engines. Sites with broken links are downgraded over a period of time in search rankings. Similarly links from sources that are not credible brings negative confidence to your site. Make sure authoritative sites and blogs boost traffic and rankings. Focus on link quality and design to build a brand image and better SEO prospects.
- Failure to use optimised keywords in content
While keyword stuffing may be a crime in itself, failure to use keywords to optimize the presence of your website, is the other end of the SEO goof-up spectrum. Instead of choosing keywords that are ideal to describe your product/services, choose keywords that are symbiotic with delivering high user experience. The web provides many keyword suggestion tools to choose appropriate words for your website. Long tail keywords that use three or four keywords can help you target buyers at every phase of the buying cycle. Keeping an eye on your competitor’s content and constant updating your own will help you maintain your rankings in search engines. Bold them, highlight them, get into limelight at all times.
- Failure to configure major search-engine webmaster tools to your site
With all the efforts put to design the right content with adequate keywords, if you fail to configure your site with major search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo, all your SEO efforts are pretty much wasted. This common but costly mistake is easily avoidable and a basic to check indexing status of your website and optimize its visibility.
SEO mistakes is not an exhaustive list. There are many more such as using too much images, using flash website without an HTML alternative or backlink spamming etc., An inexperienced digital presence can cause lot of damage to the company image, hence your SEO efforts should be planned and executed in a systematic manner to derive maximum benefits.