What are the most common errors in SEO? But even SEO experts are inevitable in the process of Website Optimization, let’s take a look at the 10 most common errors and improve them to increase traffic and increase conversion rates.
Optimizing for a website or blog is an essential element in any content marketing campaign. Although SEO is volatile, it is still of particular interest to content marketers because this is the most powerful way of bringing in potential customers and directing them to the company’s sales channel.
The 10 most common SEO errors you should avoid
SEO methods are constantly changing to meet the ever-evolving search engine and changes brought about by the user’s perspective. The search engine optimization (SEO) for the site always needs improvement and updates. If the SEO strategy is not good or SEO is not effective then you will never get what to expect. They are High Traffic and High Conversion Rate.
There are some common SEO errors that are difficult to avoid. Examining the optimization process is a very difficult problem because you cannot verify your method immediately. And especially predicting the rules of search engines is becoming more and more difficult than before.
Take a look at the 10 most common SEO mistakes that you should avoid during the optimization process for your website.
1. Choose the wrong keyword
Optimization depends on the target keywords ranked for your site. But have you chosen the right keywords?
One of the most common errors in keyword selection is the ignoring of long tail keywords (preferred by search engines and users). Although you can define or name your products in a certain way, you need to understand the important point that customers will care about and name the products that you own, what they will type to search. Sometimes you think you have chosen the right keywords but they are not exactly the same for others or they are too general. If the situation like the two above cases, you need to optimize the wrong keywords, choose the keywords accordingly.
It is best before starting the optimization process that you need to research and analyze the overall keyword carefully. You can also use keyword analysis tools like:
- Google AdWords KeywordPlanner,
- Google Trends
- SEMrush
- Moz Keyword Explorer to choose the exact keywords for the optimization process.
2. Keyword stuffing
You may think that using the target keyword in each content will increase rankings. However, this wrong strategy cannot be continued. In fact, excessive usage of keywords will be judged on search engines as spam, and thus it will negatively affect your SEO performance.
“Cramming” at all costs or excessive use of keywords is not the deciding factor for SEO success. Such an approach would make your content unnatural and useless to readers. In fact, Google is applying a hidden semantic search algorithm, which is LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). This program can recognize content themes and therefore you do not need to cram content by repeating target keywords.
So, the question is how much frequency of keywords is reasonable? The answer is 1.5%, please refer to the keyword allocation section in the article: Writing SEO content that is friendly to Google.
3. Create content Unrelated to Keywords
Another common mistake in SEO is to create content that doesn’t fit the keywords. The problem is that you want to rank for a certain keyword but can’t focus the text on the target topic. Search engines like Google need to best meet the needs of users to find information, so the content of the article must be closely related to the target keywords – search phrases. Thus, the content does not meet the needs of users will not have high rankings on the search results page.
This mistake is often the result of trying to fit a number of different topics in a piece of content, this low-quality work aims to include keywords or optimization purposes for many keywords in an article. You need to set a goal for writing the content is that they must be created based on the answers, the answer is the search phrases that really match the questions and needs of the readers. The search engine will then be able to mark the content as relevant to the keyword that is being optimized.
4. The content published is not original
This next typical error relates to the quality of your content. Text cloning is a common practice today, but search engines have improved to penalize this issue. Copy and integrate content is considered a spam practice and is not preferred.
Copy content from other websites
There will be no room for duplicate and superficial content. Instead of copying or using content mixing software, you should really invest the time and effort to create article products that are original documents and really make sense. This is the only way to ensure and maintain your site’s ranking on search results pages.
Refer to the article: Creating original and quality content
5. Ignore title tags and meta descriptions
It is not a comprehensive optimization if the target keywords are not yet included in your article. You should not ignore title tags and meta descriptions. They are all essential elements of SEO. Ignoring them means you’ve missed a huge potential for your content. These optimization factors are considered by search engines when crawling website information so if it is done properly, they will improve the performance of the content.
Description for ATL tags improves SEO efficiency
One specification that content marketers sometimes forget is to include image description tags (alt tags). The use of alt tags for images in your content will be important because they are another indication of how you are targeting your posts. Search engines can’t see images – but they can read alt tags and add this information to the indexing of your pages.
6. Lack of quality links
For the most effective SEO, we need to pay attention to the quality of external links when integrated into the content of the article. External links may not “need” much but they must be “quality”. Outbound links must be links that lead to relevant and reputable pages.
Having links to related pages (linked to your site) will be extremely valuable and the anchor text needs to show so readers know what those outbound links are about and it can bring convenience as well as being useful for readers.
Therefore, avoid using ‘click here’ with anchor text and it is best to use each different and meaningful anchor text for an external link. Avoid using one anchor text for multiple links because if you do that you could be judged as spam.
7. Going wrong internal links
You should also watch out for common mistakes while using internal links. Naturally, it is important to think about your top performing pages and consider putting links to them in your content. This is one way to increase visibility and create more constraints for pages.
But make sure that the use of internal links in your posts is appropriate, i.e. not for the purpose of having them in an article. Internal links when they are used should match the topic and the focus of the paragraph or article.
Just like when you use too much “keyword stuffing”, here you have to avoid while using internal links. If the content and links seem unnatural, your article will not be appreciated by the target customers and search engines, and the possibility is that they can be viewed as a cheat behaviour.
8. Not focus on speed and mobile friendly
SEO optimization is not just about content and keywords. It is also about the quality of your website, especially its performance on mobile devices, which is the top choice of users today. Google and other search engines can recognize when your site is not mobile friendly (see also Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update).
If the mobile experience is not highly rated, not smooth for users, then it is likely that your ranking on the search engines will be seriously affected. The same goes for download speeds, as search engines also focus on that. Not surprisingly, a slow website will lose its SERP rankings. You can use online tools like Google PageSpeed Insight to analyze and solve page loading problems.
Data analysis and user experience with mobile devices
9. Do not use the power of people to influence social media interactions
Optimization also has a social dimension. When you share your content on social media, one of your main goals is to attract the attention of users who have significant online influence. This means their content is noticed by both the target audience and search engines. That’s why it’s important to build relationships with power users and use their credibility to promote your content.
Another aspect of this is sending blog posts or promotional websites to social sites like Digg, Reddit or Quora without power users (influence). Building relationships and taking an organized approach through influencers is an integral part of your optimization strategy.
10. Forget analytical problems
The last but not least thing here is to use analytics tools to track the process of optimizing and optimizing search content. Many marketers will skip this stage, but this is a serious mistake. Setting up and regularly reviewing analytics is essential for your optimization results.
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are just two of the main tools you can use to measure and get an overview of your site’s performance. With the help of the tools above, you can monitor the optimization that takes place for each different content type as well as evaluate the impact of each different strategy you are applying.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization (SEO) is now an integral part of any content marketing strategy. You can find many SEO tips online, but pay special attention to typical SEO mistakes. Best of all, familiarize yourself with them, with the challenges that others have to encounter, and avoid getting caught up in your marketing efforts. These 10 errors have been proven to be quite common, so they will be easily recognized before you make them.