SEO is a very important part of our website. There are various SEO methods that continue to evolve and bring about new developments. Website owners, content creators, want to stay on top of it to take advantage of it.
But it’s not that easy to optimise your website or content as part of a constantly changing SEO. There are many struggles to maintain SEO health. However, with this list common but important mistakes, you can avoid doing these and keep the SEO performance to a maximum.
So, here are the Top SEO mistakes to avoid.
SEO Mistake #1: Not Optimizing Meta Tags
These types of errors are the most common for websites. This may seem like a small problem, but it plays an important role in helping search engines identify the types of content on your website.
Meta tags are title tags, meta descriptions and alt tags. Title tags shows the title of your page. The title tags for each page should be unique, short but descriptive, and a click that attracts the user’s attention in the Search Engine Results (SERPs) page.
You can use the meta description tags to describe the content of your pages. It also gives you the opportunity to add keywords that make up the page. Make sure you use unique descriptions to describe each and every page of your website.
Alt tags provides text image details for visually impaired people and search engines. It also shows when the image could not be loaded for any reason.
So, you are never supposed to miss this for any of your pages. In case you miss any of these, the user’s engagements may be affected. It can also result in low click through rates.
SEO Mistake #2: Don’t Create Copied Contents
The next common SEO error is copied content or duplicate content. There are many similar types of businesses, there are websites that offer the same products and services. And in such scenarios, most websites try to copy the contents of a high ranking website.
But now, if you do something like this, you can be penalised. Copying and plagiarising content is seen as a spamming practise. And it could affect your SEO rankings.
Instead of copying plagiarising content, you can spend some of your time creating completely new quality content. That could be a worthy thing to do. And the ranking of your website won’t go down that way.
Create unique content that includes valuable information. You can add videos , images and infographics to keep the reader engaged.
SEO Mistake #3: Not Optimizing Links
Creating links is another important part of SEO. Which, most of the websites do wrong. To get the best results from linking, you should include quality external links. Link to high-authority or reputable websites. Avoid anchor texts such as click here on links. Instead, you can add the name of the topic.
In addition, link to the internal pages that provide more information about the keyword you have chosen. This will also increase your user engagement and reduce your bounce rate. And as far as SEO is concerned, search engine crawlers can crawl every page of your website without being stuck in a single page.
In addition, add internal links based on the length and type of content of your page. Don’t add too many links.
Use a proper link structure that tells the user, which page to redirect when clicking on the link. Don’t use any numbers on the links that can reduce the chances of link clicks.
In addition, monitor your website and check for any broken links and fix them.
SEO Mistake #4: Ignoring Server and Site Performance Issues
Issues of the server such as 404 (page not found), Permanent Redirects, Broken Links. These are the most critical types of issues. These types of issues may occur at any time if your page is deleted or you have moved the page from the current URL to a different URL without redirecting it.
These types of issues are not good for your website’s SEO. The user who wants to access the page will get an error and it may break his interest. For their query, the user can look for alternative options. And they may not click on your link again when they see it. This could damage your ranking as well.
Same as with Site Performance, if your website is loading slowly, users will have to wait longer, which may increase the chances of a user leaving your site. It also increases the bounce rate and reduces the search ranking of your site.
You can use Google, GTMetrix, Pingdom to test your Site Speed. And from the results you can also learn about the factors that make your site slower.
Some of the common factors that affect site speed are page size, not using browser caching, unoptimized image files, slow hosting, unminified JavaScript and CSS files. So, try to avoid these SEO errors as these are the most common issues while ranking your site.
SEO Mistake #5: Not Optimizing for Mobile Devices
This is one of the most important SEO mistakes that people make by not optimizing their website for mobile users. The SEO is no longer just creating content and focusing on keywords. It’s also about the quality of your site.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, the experience of your mobile users may be suffer and the search rankin may be affected as well. As google, looking more and more into mobile-first-indexing.
Make sure your website is responsive and quickly loading on mobile devices. Also, make sure that your content is loading properly on mobile devices to prevent users from leaving your site.
You can also test your mobile site using Google PageSpeed Insights. Make sure you use the tool and optimize your mobile site.
SEO Mistake #6: Not Optimizing Website Pages for Crawlers
If you miss the crawl issues on your site then some of your pages may not be visible on search engines. And there are many factors that can cause crawler issues. Such as internal links having nofollow attribute that blocks any potential link from flowing through your site.
Sitemap.xml file not found on your site. It makes search engine crawlers to explore your website. Also, if there is no link to your sitemaps.xml in your robots.txt file, search engines will not be able to fully understand your website structure.
There are more issues that can cause crawler not crawling issues such as pages not crawled, broken images, broken links, 4xx errors, URLs containing underscores.
SEO Mistake #7: Failing to Utilize Analytics
And the final SEO mistake is not the use of analytics. This is the most common mistake that most people miss when using their website. However, you can avoid this error by using the free Google Analytics and Google Search Console tools to check the performance of your site.
With these tools, you can check which pages have more views and which keywords are driving more traffic. Tools can help you better understand your website and its contents. It can also help you implement the SEO strategy.
Conclusion
Now that you have an understanding of SEO mistakes, you can start optimising your website. All things combined can have an impact on your website ranking. Use the above list as a reference and try to fix the issues, and you can share them with your friends so that they do not do these mistakes.
You can also try the website audit to learn more about the status of Meta Tags on your website, the factors that slow down your site, the issues of crawlability, and so many more.
Fixing the issues can definitely help you improve your ranking and achieve your goals.
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