10 Reasons of Why SEO Efforts Might Have Failed

As you guys probably already know, I am very active in SEO forums and there is a question that keeps on coming back which is “Why did my SEO campaign fail?“. There are maybe hundreds of answers to that question. It may be that your on-page optimization hasn’t been well done,  link building campaign wasn’t optimized properly and many others.

SEO Campaign Failed

Through this article, I will try my best to give you the most common SEO mistakes that webmasters do which can jeopardize your seo efforts.

On-Page Optimization

Too Many Keywords

A lot of the time, people tend to optimize their web page with way too many keywords. This creates confusion and irrelevant content. You should use 1 keyword idea to describe one particular page. This means that every keyword in that page should be relevant to one another.

Using too many keywords in one page isn’t going to get you higher ranked, in fact, you might even lose rankings. Keep the amount of keywords per page low and highly related to the pages idea and content.
With the same idea, avoid over optimizing your text and content by using keyword stuffing. Don’t be fooled by keyword repetition. It is recommended to repeat your keywords a few times throughout your page however repeating it excessively won’t do you any good. Keyword repetition is recommended and normal as your text should be written for humans and not search engines. Always look the most natural possible.

Wrong Keywords

Most people tend to wonder why they aren’t getting the results expected from their campaign or why they don’t see an increase in traffic. Well it’s probably because you are targeting the wrong keywords. Many people optimize their websites for keywords that do not describe the main idea of their web page.

I suggest you write a long list of all the keywords you think describes best your web page and then make a smaller list out of that one. You can refer to our Finding Relevant and High-Value Keywords – Tutorial article to help you with that task.

Another thing to verify is the competition of that keyword. If you are targeting a highly competitive keyword and you are new to the whole SEO world, then it is better to optimize for less competitive keywords in the same industry to start with and build up your SEO strategy to rank for high-value and relevant keywords.

Duplicate Content

We all know that duplicate content is probably one of the worst things for your website. Don’t ever copy-paste content to your website from other sources because you will stop appearing in SERPs. Another bad thing about duplicate content pages is that they consume link juice that could be used for other more important pages throughout your website. If there is one thing that we are positive that search engines do not tolerate is duplicate content.
Here is a video by Matt Cuts, head of Google Web Spam team, explaining how they detect duplicate content.
Another issue with duplicate content is that some people don’t redirect their website from the “non-www” version to the “www” version and vice-versa. This could create duplicate content because search engines see that as 2 different pages. Of course, the search engines are intelligent enough to know it is the same website, but it is always good to have the redirect configured.
Here is the code to redirect from the “non-www” to the “www” version:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This goes also for websites that have 2 or more versions of their home page. By that I mean that people have .com and .com/index.html or .com/index.php as their home pages. You should use a canonical tag to tell the search engine that no matter what version of the page he lands on, the one in the canonical tag is the correct one.
Here is the code for a canonical tag:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mysite.com/” />

For any more information on what is considered duplicate content and what is not, visit Google’s Duplicate Content Guidelines.

Title, Meta Tags, H1

Your most important keywords should always be present in your title tag, meta description tag, and header tags. For the title tag, put your most important keyword first because order has weight. A keyword placed first will have more weight than a keyword that is placed last. Make sure your Titles are intuitive and very important as that is what searchers use to determine if they will click to visit your website or not.

For the Meta Description tag, you should also include your main keywords in it because they will bold to match the users query. So it is important that you have a short but precise description that is attractive to the searcher. A good description could greatly increase your click through rate. The first thing a user does before clicking on you when you show up in SERPs is reading your title then the description so it is very important that is it precise and attractive.

The header tags should always contain your main keywords. I recommend using the h1 tag only once per page and putting it near the top of the page. Always remember that order has weight so the higher it is in your page, the more weight it will have. Even in the h1 tag, your main keyword should be placed first. And the reason why you should use it only once per page is because the h1 tag has the most weight. For other headers, use the h2 and h3 tags accordingly. Anything lower than h3 isn’t worth using because it has no weight.

Link Building – Off-Page Optimization

Anchor Text

A lot of people focus so hard on creating links in relevant niches that they forget to optimize their anchor texts. Backlinks are very important because they act like votes in your favor. Now if you add an anchor text, it will tell the search engine that not only am I giving this web page a vote, I am voting for it in that particular category (anchor text).
Here is what a well optimized anchor text looks like:

<a href=”http://www.YourDomainName.com/”>Main Keyword As Anchor Text</a>

Here is a video explaining how you should optimize your anchor texts:
Optimizing your anchor texts is the most important part of all link building campaigns. Avoid using irrelevant anchor texts with your links such as “click here” or anything like that. Your anchor texts should always contain keywords for which you wish to rank high for in search engines.

Too Many Outgoing Links

Each web page should have a maximum of 100 links (internal + external to your website). Web pages that have too many outgoing links could be considered as link farms and getting links from those web pages isn’t good. Google removed all of these websites from their index since the Google Panda Update. This means that any inbound link from those web pages aren’t worth anything anymore. If the web page from where you are getting links has too many outgoing links, you get a very small amount of link juice. So try focusing on getting links from high PR websites with limited amount of external links.

High PR Websites

Always concentrate on getting backlinks from high PR websites. Backlinks from those websites could pass on very valuable PR juice which can greatly affect your rankings in SERPs. You should keep in mind that links were initially created to pass traffic from one website to another. This being said, not only should you get inbound links from high PR websites, you should also focus on getting inbound links from websites that have a high amount of traffic. Not only will this increase your search engine rankings, but it may also increase your website’s traffic.

NoFollow Links

Backlinks that have a nofollow tag pass no link juice to your website since the search engine spider won’t follow it. The spider does see and record your link, but it does not follow it. Even though these links will still help increase your website’s traffic, they will not help much to increase your website’s search engine rankings.
In case you don’t know how a nofollow tag looks like, here is an example:

<a href=”http://www.YourDomainName.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Main Keyword As Anchor Text</a>

I suggest you go check all of your inbound links and make sure that the rel=”nofollow” tag isn’t present on any of them.

Links To Homepage Only

Most people tend to do this mistake. They send all of their inbound links to their homepage only and then wonder why the rest of their website isn’t ranking well. In order to get your other web pages well ranked, you will have to create inbound links pointing to those web pages. Don’t forget to optimize the anchor text as well. You can also create your links to internal pages of your website which are relevant to the link you are creating. This diversifies your links and targets more effectively the relevant content.

Quality Links

Most of the time when your SEO campaign is suffering, it is mainly because you didn’t get quality backlinks to your website. You should always work very hard on getting high quality inbound links. But a lot of people talk about high quality inbound links, but what exactly are quality inbound links? Any links with the following characteristics are considered quality inbound links:

• Links from high PR websites
• Links from relevant websites
• Links with keywords as anchor text

Irrelevant Websites

According to the Google Guidelines, any paid link is not tolerated by search engines. Search engine have some difficulties at detecting paid links, but they do detect them. Inbound links coming from irrelevant websites are most likely seen by search engines as paid links therefore not taken into account. Always keep in mind that you should look natural and natural inbound links would most likely come from relevant websites and websites around your niche.