There are several common mistakes that people tend to make frequently with regard to search engine optimization. Below is a list of the most common ones, which if avoided, can help you gain better results and profitability in the long run.
1) Optimizing the wrong keywords
The basic step for initiating SEO is choosing the keywords that are relevant to your site and optimizing them. However, if you end up selecting the wrong keywords, all the time and effort dedicated in achieving a top ranking will be wasted. While choosing keywords, there are two types of common mistakes that are made:
a) Selecting keywords that bring untargeted traffic
One of the biggest mistakes that people often make is concentrating their efforts on driving more traffic to their sites with little regard to the quality of traffic. By this we mean optimizing a website for keywords which have absolutely no relevance to the site. For example, since the keyword “cameras” is quite popular, several people may try to optimize their website for this particular keyword with the thought that if they can attain a good ranking “cameras,” their site will get huge amount of traffic. However, if your site does not deal with cameras but attracts people to your site due to the keyword popularity, it will only create a bad user experience. This is because users will return back when they notice that the site has no relevance to what they are looking for.
b) Choosing highly competitive keywords
This is another common mistake which many people make. While building a keyword list, you may want to use the most popular keywords that are searched by users. For instance, if your website promotes mortgages and loans, you may want to use the keyword “finance” as it is extremely popular. However, you may fail to realize that such keywords are highly competitive with several other advertisers competing for it and it will be very difficult to beat those sites and get the top ranking in the search results. A better option would be to choose less competitive keywords even though they may not be as popular as the competitive keywords.
2) Overstuffing meta keywords tag
It is often seen that people stuff too may keywords in the meta keywords tag in the expectation of achieving a high ranking. However, as far as search engine ranking is concerned, meta keywords tag does not hold the same value like before. By putting hundreds of keywords in it, it is not going to help you achieve a top ranking. To attain a high ranking it is important that you place your keywords in the content of your webpages.
3) Keyword repetition
Yet another common mistake people often make is continuously repeating their keywords in the content of their webpage. It is true that you may have to repeat your keywords in your text a number of times to achieve the best keyword density, however, it does not mean overloading your page with keywords placed endlessly everywhere without making any grammatical sense. Additionally, those practicing this technique stand to lose out in the long run because search engines may penalize their site for employing such practices which are considered unethical.
4) Creating multiple similar doorway pages
Another belief that people hold to be true is that different pages should be created for different search engines since each search engine has its own algorithm. This concept is good as far as theory goes, however, it is not helpful and considered unethical. Firstly, it would take up all your time and efforts to not only create several pages which would become difficult to manage but also to update them according to the changes in the search engine algorithms. Secondly, though you may create these pages for different search engines, they may end up being quite similar to each other. Also, since doorway pages are considered as a Black Hat SEO technique which is unethical, it can also lead to your site getting banned. The best idea would be to create a single page and optimize it for one keyword for all search engines.
5) Use of hidden text
This involves inserting text that is mostly repetitive use of keywords usually placed at the bottom of the page. This hidden text is text colored to blend with the background of the page and is invisible to the user visiting the page. In order to achieve a top search engine ranking, webmasters seek to create keyword rich webpages. However, you cannot repeat keywords in a webpage endlessly as it would appear very weird to the visitor. So to make sure that the page content does not come across as strange to the visitor, but at the same time the page is keyword rich, webmasters place keywords having the same color as the background color of the webpage. The concept behind this is that the search engine spiders can detect the hidden text even if people cannot see it, as these spiders read the page’s content through the HTML code. However, it would be in your best interest to avoid using this technique as it is considered unethical and can lead to your site getting penalized.
6) Creating graphical webpages
Search engines are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, sounds, flash movies, javascript, frames, directories, and similar stuff. Having lots graphics on your website may not be very helpful from the SEO point of view as these will not aid in achieving a high ranking. What you need to have on your site is a good amount of keyword rich content that can be crawled and indexed by search engine spiders.
7) Page Cloaking
Page Cloaking means using one webpage for the search engine that crawls the site and then altering the webpage to show another page to users. This alteration of web pages is used as a practice to trick the search engines and will deceive users about the content they will see when clicking on the search results. This technique is generally used either to prevent the competitors from viewing the source code of the optimized pages or to prevent users from seeing pages that are meant to be crawled and indexed by the search engines solely. This tactic makes it possible to prevent the search engines from spidering pages that users will see. It is recommended that you refrain from using this technique to prevent your site getting penalized or banned.
8) Too many page submissions per day
Another mistake most commonly made by people is making too many page submissions in a single day to the search engines. This can lead to overlooking of many pages from the site by the search engines. Preferably you should try submitting one page per day to search engines even though there are some search engines which accept more than one page submission from a specific domain. This will help you remain within the submission limits of all search engines, especially those which only accept one page in a day.
9) Using submission tools that are automated
It is a fact that manual submissions of sites to search engines require a lot of time and effort. Most often to save time, a lot of people use automated submission software or tools that can quickly submit sites to the search engines. However, it is important to understand that using such tools are not in the best interest of search engines and can lead to your webpages being penalized. Thus, it is better to either hire professionals who can do this for you and if budget is a constraint you can do it yourself as it would be worth your time and effort.
10) Dedicating too much time for search engine ranking
Another common mistake that people usually make is getting over obsessed to achieve high rankings to such an extent that they overlook the other important factors like their website quality, products and service quality, and so on that are equally important. No doubt search engine optimization is the best way to drive real time traffic to your site and requires you to devote a lot of time and effort to implement it but it may not be of much help to you if you lack in your product or service quality, customer satisfaction, etc. You may enjoy top rankings in the search engines but it is also crucial to devote considerable amount of time and efforts to your website as well because the ultimate goal of any business is conversions.
