Top 3 Most Common SEO Mistakes

If there’s one thing you need to know about SEO, it’s this: there are no shortcuts. If Search Engine Optimization is a race, then SEO is a marathon, not a sprint race. Everything about SEO speaks of doing things in the long run. No top-ranked page ever shot to the first page of SERP overnight. And even websites that achieve first page SERP listing need to continuously improve and adapt to the ever growing number of competition. In fact, if you think SEO is just a one-time optimization deal, then you’ve just committed common SEO…

Mistake #1

Optimizing your website once and then leaving it thinking SEO will do the job on its own – even top ranked sites need to continuously add new content and keep abreast of new changes to stay on top of the SERP battle. Staying still means stagnating, and stagnating is never good in an ever changing environment where players are always fighting for the top spot. Aside from providing regular and timely content, you need to continuously check your SEO stats in order to make correct changes and updates to your webpage.

Mistake #2

Perhaps one of the more egregious mistakes SEO newbies make is keyword stuffing. This is the practice of unnecessarily loading keywords in content or in Meta tags. Not only will keyword stuffing not help you in increasing your site’s ranking, it will often get your site blacklisted and consequently banned by search engines. Use your keywords or key phrases sparingly, using it only in the most appropriate places. Use it once in your Meta tags and images tags, and then use it naturally in your content. And don’t try to commit an even worse mistake…

Mistake # 3

Using senseless, grammatically incorrect phrases in your content in the misplaced belief that keywords need to be grouped together in a certain order for it to be crawled by spiders – this practice just screams: WE DON’T VALUE OUR READERS. WE THINK WE’RE SMARTER THAN GOOGLE. Guess what’ll happen next? Your visitors will be turned off by your content and will never come back again, and Google? Well, Google does not necessarily penalize this kind of practice, but they do reward websites that offer relevant information in sync with their tags and keywords by ranking those sites highly. So next time you’re told putting “Affordable Web Design services San Jose California CA” as is in a copy is OK, stop and just fire the guy. Tip: it’s ok to use stop words to separate grammatically incorrect key phrases to make it grammatically correct. In our example above, instead of writing, <company name> offers the most affordable web design services San Jose California CA, write it this way instead: <company name> offers the most affordable web design services in San Jose California, CA. Notice how just the inclusion of the single stop word “in” made our copy infinitely better and grammatically correct too?

Last word

Perhaps the biggest mistake an enterprising webmaster/web owner can make is in neglecting to read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Not only is it’s free, it’s also full of information and quite frankly, the most authoritative SEO guide you’ll ever get.