Webmasters makes Common SEO Mistakes

Most webmasters that take on a “do it yourself” SEO campaign tend do to a lot of mistakes without even realizing it. They optimize their website the wrong way or using black hat techniques and don’t see any results and ask themselves “what did I do wrong?”. Well in today’s article, I am going to shed some light on the most common SEO mistakes done by webmasters.

The Title Tag

The title tag is a very important thing for your web page. When a search engine starts crawling your page, it will read the title first and with that, it will assess what is being talked about in your page. The search engine will look for relevancy between your content and your title and rank it depending on how relevant they are to one another. If applied properly, the title tag plays a big part in boosting your rankings.
You should place your main keywords in your title tag. Place the keywords for which you would like to be ranked for in the beginning of the tag. Remember that order has weight, the closer the keyword or key-phrase is to the beginning of the tag, the more ranking weight it has. Include keywords that will allow stemming as well. Make sure that your title tag matches your content and your meta description tag. Also, each title for each web page should be unique, do not repeat the same title twice in your website’s pages.

Link Building

The most important part of any SEO campaign is without a doubt link building. Even if your on-page optimization is done perfectly and you haven’t done any link building, it will be almost impossible to gain higher ranks. Every inbound link that you get from websites is like a vote in your favor.  Some links have more weight than others. For instance, if I get an inbound link from CNN (which has a PR 10) this link is worth more than 100 inbound links from smaller PR websites.

You can’t rely only on your title tag because it contains great keywords or your content because you wrote it perfectly. You have to concentrate on creating good amounts of inbound links. This is probably the hardest task of SEO but it is the one that will show the real results.

A good way to start your link building campaign is to submit your website to web directories. Look for human edited directories because automated ones never get reviewed, therefore no relevancy with what you are posting, and nobody will ever review that. Another good way is to be active in forums, offer your help and expertise for free and make sure to add a link back to your website (always including your keywords as anchor texts).

Blogs also are a great way to get inbound links because if you write a good article, people will pick it up and give a back-link to you saying “this is where I got this amazing article”. Submit your articles to article directories such as EzineArticles.com or even GoArticles.com. Always offer fresh, new content that people would want to read and to link to.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the main reasons why your website probably can’t get ranked and possibly banned from SERPs. It is very important in SEO to offer your own unique content. I’ve seen some website copy and pasting content from other websites thinking that they will rank just as high as them because they have the same content. This is completely wrong. A search engine is smart enough to know which website the content belongs to. Especially if you take your content from a well known and high PR website.

You want to add a 301 redirect from your “www” website version to your “non-www” website version or vice-versa depending on how you want it to appear. Search engines see those 2 sub-domains as two different websites. So make sure you choose which one you want to go with and create the redirect. If you need more information on duplicate content or on how to create website 301 redirects, we offer a great article on how to avoid duplicate content.

If a search engine realizes that your website contains duplicate content, he will flag it for a review and eventually, you will probably get banned from all SERPs. If this is your case, I strongly suggest that you review your whole content and write something new that is unique to yourself. Once that is done, do a search engine submission for your website. This will send the spider to come crawl your website to see if any changes have been made. This will grant you access to get indexed once again and if everything is done well, eventually ranked. You can also ask the search engines for a website reconsideration if it was banned.

Anchor Text

Now that we know how important link building is, I will be sharing with you the importance of the inbound links anchor texts. Your anchor texts should always contain your main keywords or key-phrases. This will tell search engines that your getting a vote for that keyword or key-phrase. You web page content should also be containing the same keywords that is in your anchor text. The search engine will note that there is relevancy between your link and your content. Also the website from which you’re getting these links should be relevant to what it is you promote or sell. This is probably the most effective way to get ranked high in SERPs.

For example, if I sell used cars, then I would have some content in my website stating that I sell used cars, what type of cars, and so on. Then I would go in a forum that writes about used cars, where you could find them, etc. In that forum, I will configure my signature to say “Buy used cars, we carry many brands …”. In this case “buy used cars” is a perfect anchor. It is what you sell, your on-page content is relevant, you have a link back from a relevant forum, and the anchor text gives you a vote and is relevant to your content.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step to any SEO campaign. You cannot start an SEO campaign without having done a proper keyword research. This is a common error beginners do. They tend to select keywords they think are good. Taking guesses in SEO won’t get you far, you have to be sure of what you are doing. You have to think of what would people write as queries to find you or the services you have to offer. Doing a proper keyword research will ensure you that you have the right keywords or key-phrases that people would search for.

Spamming Your Keywords

Let’s take the “used car” example again. All your web pages do not need to contain “used car” in your title tag, meta description tag, and so on. Be original, try to write for humans and not for search engines. Write in a way that everything looks natural and clean. A person that will read your web page won’t like to see “used car for sale” or “buy used cars” after every 4 – 5 words. It makes your text very heavy and boring to read. Find yourself a specific amount of keywords or key-phrases you would like to use. Once you have found those keywords, use a combination or/and a variation of those keywords/key-phrases. Use those variations throughout your web pages and repeat them 5 – 6 times.

Patience

One of most frequent mistake is that people do not wait to see results. It’s not because you just updated your title tag and content that you will see results the next day. The search engine has to come crawl your website which can be very short or very long. Even once it has crawled you, it won’t place you exactly where you are supposed to be ranked. It might have to come crawl it again in 2 weeks and give you a better ranking and so on. The even longer step is that to find your inbound links, it has to crawl every single website where your link exists and register that vote to you.

Patience is very important in SEO. SEO is an ongoing effort that never stops. Don’t think that because you are first you have completed your campaign. You are not the only one fighting for that spot, so if you stop bringing update to your website, there are big chances you will lose your rankings.