The 3 Common SEO Mistakes You Have To Be Careful With
SEO is writing content that people and search engines can both read. People want solid information they can get through without working at it. Google wants pages it can index without guessing.
While the goal is rather straightforward, the process involved in getting there can be quite the opposite. And because of this, many people who say they can effectively perform SEO make mistakes that cause them to fail.
Below are some of the most common ones, and what to do about each one.
1, Stuffing Keywords
The practice of using as many keywords as possible in the content you publish used to pay off. Less than a decade ago, SEO experts had the nasty habit of repeating keywords many times in a single post just to push their content higher in SERPs.
Fortunately, those days are long gone. Search engines today are much smarter and won’t fall for those tactics. They will actually go as far as penalizing your site, making you rank lower than you would otherwise.
These days, it’s all about using keywords strategically. That means using them where they make sense and sound natural, while not going overboard with their use. It’s about making sure that the content stays readable for the user.
2, Not having internal links
You’ve got a fantastic piece of content that’s sure to provide value to your customers. The problem is that it doesn’t really offer much in terms of where they should go next.
You see, the Internet is built on links. It’s a network, after all, and that means you should take every sensible opportunity to build those connections so that users are directed to where you want them to go.
If your article simply ends where it does, your guests will have no other option but to navigate away. You would’ve missed a prime opportunity to lead them to other important parts of your site, an event that search engines take into great consideration when ranking your pages.
**3, **Forgetting to optimize media files
SEO isn’t limited to just text-based content. In fact, restricting your optimization to just these aspects of your website means that all the other types of content you have are not being seen by search engines or people.
This is a huge no-no as media files such as images and videos are highly sought after. They’re also inherently more engaging for most people, and they can be incredibly rich in information that can be delivered in a time-efficient manner.
If your media files don’t have captions and alt text for search engines to recognize, they won’t appear in SERPs. That means you’d be missing out on a huge chunk of traffic that could’ve done a lot of good for your business.
Conclusion
That is not the whole list. Other mistakes will cost your business just as much. Still, this is a fine place to start. Pull up your own content, find where they show up, and fix them now instead of next quarter. Your site will perform better for it.
We are a digital marketing and web design agency in Anchorage. If you need us to guide you through SEO best practices, get in touch with us today and we’ll be happy to help you out.