tagged: SEO 101 Common Mistakes

SEO 101 Common Mistakes

Posted by admin in News & Updates, SEO News

There seems to be a lot of differing opinions about SEO. Some feel it’s easy to do, others feel it is not important. There are designers who think good CSS = SEO, writers who think good content = SEO, and developers who think SEO = BS. The strange thing is that for all the disparaging remarks about SEO, businesses of all sizes are making the same SEO mistakes that they were making ten years ago. If you ask true SEO professionals they can easily come up with 101 common mistakes that businesses make with SEO. They can be grouped into ten categories, and should be studied if you’re planning on using SEO to bring your product or service to market.

General Strategy

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO result from looking at SEO as existing outside your business goals instead of complementing the business plan strategy. Mistakes include not including SEO in initial business planning and changing SEO plans in the middle of a campaign.

Market Research

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO involve paying too much attention to what competitors are doing and a failure to do your own market research. It also includes failing to deal with negative feedback and a lack of the right tracking analytics.

Keywords

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO include actions like choosing keywords outside your budget, keywords that are more industry speak rather than consumer led terms, and focusing on vanity terms instead of deeper and better converting terms.

Content

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO include copying content from other sites, using keywords too frequently, creating content that has no value.

Links

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO include such things as concentrating on volume over quality, buying link lists that include links to unrelated markets, using several companies to build links with no coordination between them.

URLs

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO include using unfriendly symbols like underscores instead of hyphens, not using the correct responses for broken pages or moved content, and using long strings instead of short, static URLs with proper file extension.

Equity

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO include using sitewide links to low value pages, linking every page to every other page, using “click here” or other phrases as default choices for internal links, and not understanding “First link first”.

Code

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO include actions like using a lot of inline JavaScript and CSS and keeping the files on the same domain which adds to download time, unoptimised images with large file sizes, and denying access to spiders through Robot.txt

Relationships

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO refer to how well you work with and communicate with your SEO Company and include not keeping the SEO Company in the loop regarding business changes and not fulfilling requests for content and information.

Anonymity

The SEO mistakes in this category of SEO involve talking or broadcasting your use of SEO, including leaving clues in source code, asking SEO advice on public forums, and posting link requests in blog comments.

This is just a brief overview of the different categories of SEO mistakes. If you know or work with a SEO pro, they can probably tell you all the common mistakes of SEO.