Top 4 mistakes to avoid for good SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is never an easy task to undertake, which is why knowing which mistakes to avoid for good SEO is vital. For any website, be it personal or business, to be successful it will take a lot of research and practice in SEO. Even then, some of the most common mistakes can be made.

Many SEO mistakes are made because of using old and outdated SEO methods. Search engines like Google regularly update their algorithm to make searches better and stop website owners from “gaming the system”. So, the first mistake is really learning from old SEO guides. Make sure that when you are learning about SEO, that it is as relevant to the current Google update as possible. It’s these mistakes to avoid that we will address and cover what you can do instead for good SEO.

Writing weak content and coping it.

Finding better content is the whole purpose of a search engine’s algorithms. Reading better content is what every viewer or potential client wants. Therefore, writing better content for your website is always the goal for any content writer. It doesn’t take a whole article to figure that out, but what is better content?

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Margaret Wolfe Hungerford would say. We could maybe adjust that to, “Better content is in the eye of the reader.” That reader being your audience and clients. To really start making good content, you can’t just be a good writer, but you need to understand who is reading it. The first readers are search engines followed by your viewers and potential clients.

As a content writer, it’s bad practice to copy someone else’s content. As a business website owner, it could severely lower your rankings. In simpler words, never do this. Search engines like Google can easily pick it up and you may be surprised by how quickly your clients will too.

Better content comes from understanding both the topic and your reader. Which means you should never try to deceive with clickbait headlines or push out articles with weak content.

How to write better for Google.

To start, make sure that your headline and article topics match and do a lot of research. Proper research becomes personal knowledge and that is what you want to share. You cannot share better content with just a handful of words. Sure, you want to be concise, but search engines want the best to rank higher, which means a proper discussion that is usually over 300 words is desirable. Next, think about the keywords that you will be using and how they fit into your content.

Remember: Google wants to find the best result for humans, so write for humans first.

Using inappropriate keywords.

When your potential clients and readers search for a topic in Google, the algorithm will search for web pages that match the words in the search the best. This makes keywords one of the most important steps to any SEO project, yet people still fall short.

Whether it be a lack of research or cramming your web page with many of the same keywords this can become a real problem for ranking on Google. Your clients either won’t find your content or it won’t be readable for them to learn anything.

How to use keywords effectively.

If you ever feel like you have done enough keyword research and all you have are a handful of long-tail phrases, you haven’t done enough. You should study your competition, find the most popular keywords and then decide on the keywords that you want to compete with.

Using an SEO plugin can also really benefit your content writing if you are using a good content management system (CMS) like WordPress. They will let you know when your keywords are too low or high in density. Lastly, use one keyword per page and focus on better content while using related keywords. Both your clients and search engines will favour that.

Making an impossible URL.

As a business and website owner, your domain name should be brand related and easy to read. While you likely already have a strong domain name, it can be very easy to clutter up what comes after the “.com” part of your URL. The problems don’t stop at your clients’ memory, but it can make the organization of your website a nightmare, leaving you with strings of messy, incomprehensible text.

How to make a rememberable URL.

When you have important pages that you want clients to find, making every part of the URL easy to remember is important. Make sure to use your keyword and maybe one other detail about the page it is for. If this is a problem you wish to solve, make sure you change and redirect your old links so that you do not end up with the HTTP error 404 ruining your SEO.

Getting more links over quality links.

Thinking that getting more links to your website is better is an easy trap to fall into. While gaining links to your business website help your SEO, search engines care more about the quality of the link. It used to be that quantity was important which is why this is still one of the biggest mistakes to avoid for good SEO

Is it relevant to your brand and how trustworthy is the source? That is the questions you need to ask with SEO links. Links you can buy or ones that come from websites that have no value to Google will hurt your SEO.

How to get links that will improve your SEO.

If the website you are looking to get a link from has been penalized before, doesn’t rank on Google or sells links, stay away from them. One way to do this is to pick and choose the websites you want to link to you. Build relationships with the website owner or content creator from a website that make content relevant to your brand and ask them to link to your website.

For more organic results, you need to go back to your content. When content is helpful and insightful with information others can learn from, content creators are more likely to share it with their audiences.

Complete your SEO strategy with an experienced team.

Search engines like Google constantly change the way websites can improve their rank. This can change or even destroy SEO strategies that may have once worked. To maintain your rank on Google, you need to stay on top of every update and learn from every success you can. That is why having a team of highly trained SEO experts is a good investment for future business. With Web2Web, you can have just that, a team ready to improve your rank at a moment’s notice.

We understand how to make your business goals meet effective SEO to give you a boost in business performance online. If you want to avoid these mistakes for good SEO and see your rank on Google improve, contact us to find out how.