The worst SEO mistakes to avoid- Part 1
SEO mistakes to avoid- Part 1
1) Keywords stuffing
The times are long gone where you can repeat over and over your keywords on a page and get ranked for those keywords. Forget about creating junk pages with a robot. The search engines have grown wiser and keywords stuffing will get your site penalized SEO wise.
GrooveFunnels , the free funnel builder, has an easy interface to set-up your keywords in your headers and tags.
A while ago, digital marketers who were cranking up pages, would design a single color page and put the keywords in the same color as the background hoping that no one would realize that they were keywords stuffing! You have to admire their creativity! Again, this will get your site penalized for SEO as the bots will flag it as a spamming website.
That does not mean you should avoid your keywords like the plague. You need to have your keywords in your page or blog post and you need to repeat your keywords in the first sentence of your page or post. Do not forget to use synonyms as your readers do to!
How much is too mush keywords? A trick is to read it out loud. If it sounds repetitive or pushy, most probably you have put too many keywords in your post.
We once heard an attendee at a digital marketing seminar who said. Is it okay to say ” The crowd started shouting The Big Internet Marketing Game, The Big Internet Marketing Game…you get the idea. Although it was another clever way of having a lot of keywords on the same page, the bots do not read and just counts the keywords on the page so that page and website would have been penalized for SEO.
Regardless of the search engine being used to access information, all of them strive to provide accurate results. Any good search engine will have extensive and fresh data that are as relevant and up-to-date as possible.
2) Cloaking your website
A website as a unique URL- Uniform Resource Locator or its web address if you would like. Again, that is more an older technique but some shady digital marketers used to have one URL that would lead you to a completely different website usually for prohibited activity. When hacker take over your site, they usually do cloaking or redirecting as well. The search engines penalize those sites as they want their users to be happy about the results they provide.
If your costumer wants to access your website about golf but is redirected to an online gaming website, he will not be happy and leave. The search engines will note all the bouncing that happens when people land on that website and will penalize it for its SEO ranking.
That’s why search engines take an issue known as ‘cloaking’ so very seriously. If their livelihoods depend on the search results being accurate and informative, search engines have a duty to their own business ethics – as well as their customers – to frown upon cloaking, and they do. Do it, and your website will be removed from search results and most likely blacklisted.
So what is cloaking? Cloaking is the practice of writing a piece of programming that means human visitors to your website see something very different from what a search engine bot crawling your website sees. If you cloak effectively, you could indeed disguise your adult site as something as harmless as cleaning windows – and you’d benefit from a good SEO ranking.
3) Not having your keywords in your URL
If you are an establish brand, it does not matter if you use your keywords in your domain name but if you are starting and your website is about golf, you should have the world golf, golfing or golfer in your URL. Unfortunately, most of the great names with one or two words are long gone for the .com names and if you choose the other .info or new dot whatever, you will lose a lot of the people who are typing .com by reflex.
It is worth your time in choosing your domain name to spend extra time to find a good domain name that has your keywords in it. Even if you do not use Godaddy as your domain registrar, you can use their search function which suggests domain names that you might not have considered.
4) Having duplicate content
Whether you’re a small business or owner of a web agency, it’s a good idea to check your website for duplicate content. It’s not quite as black and white as some think, but the same graphic or tutorial could create confusion for the average consumer. It’s also a good idea to track where your traffic comes from so you can more easily identify duplicate content on your site. Real-time tracking tools might help you spot duplicates more quickly.
If you are hiring a person to write for you, make sure to check if their content is original. You can do a search for duplicate content on Copyscape or other duplicate content verifiers.
It also shows you that you should never use PLR (private label right) articles and paste them directly on your website as these are sold to many digital marketers and will count as duplicate content and will have your site penalized for SEO.
The goal of original content is to avoid the appearance of plagiarism, and it’s essential for search engines to avoid publishing text that looks exactly the same on multiple sites. Search engines love original content because it adds value to a site.
4) Not having tags for your pictures
Pictures are a great occasion to put keywords on their tags and help with your SEO. The same goes for having H1, H2 H3,etc tags which are great occasions to put in your keywords or keywords synonyms and help your SEO ranking for your pages or posts.
GrooveFunnels , the free funnel builder has an interface that helps set-up your keywords in your headers and tags.
