Simple And Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid
SEO is one of those strategies that you can implement in a few weeks, but it takes time to master it, so you can compete for high-traffic words and phrases. You’re still learning, and with a few adjustments, you can probably get that first-page ranking. It is also a fact that SEO is a fast-changing industry, and what worked a few months ago may not work today, so you need to stay educated and informed about the latest SEO developments. The same basic SEO errors are repeated over and over. Most of these are easy to find and fix, the kinds of things that any decent SEO consultant should be aware of.
If you have a site and don’t have an SEO consultant, these are a few of the things you can quickly go and check yourself. If you do have an SEO consultant, they should have brought these issues to your attention. Some common SEO mistakes are tough to avoid. Testing optimization approaches is also difficult because you can’t verify your methods in real-time, since search engines’ rules are becoming hard to predict.
To keep you and your site on track, here are some of the most common SEO mistakes we’re seeing in 2018:
Content With The Wrong Keyword:
Many people publish useful content regularly to boost their brand exposure and credibility. It also demonstrates to search engine spiders that they are active. But, many SEO professionals mistakenly put the wrong keywords, which further affects their website ranking. So, before writing any content, make sure that you have done detailed research as to what keywords should be included. Then, make sure to include the right keywords or related keywords throughout the content and especially in the headings.
Optimizing Content around one keyword:
For a long time, keywords were the focal point of SEO. If your blog post or content had a lot of keywords, it would be on Page 1. If I decided to write the word “SEO” 100 times in all of my blog posts about SEO, those articles would have been #1 on Google. But Today, that practice not only provides a poor user experience for your audience, but it’s simply ineffective since search engines are becoming increasingly better at determining search intent.
Do not optimize any pages for just one keyword. Instead, think bigger about the need your content can fill and hone in on keyword topics that include a variety of relevant and related search terms.
Not having Unique Content:
The next typical mistake is related to the quality of your content. While duplicating texts was a common practice back in the day, today, search engines penalize this approach. Copying and plagiarizing content is seen as a spammy practice and is highly discouraged.
Duplicate and thin content simply don’t work. Instead of ripping off a copy from other places or using software that ‘spins’ the content into a new shape, it’s worth investing in creating original and meaningful texts. This is the only way to make sure your website doesn’t get downgraded and pushed to the back of search results.
Not Having Unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions:
This is probably the biggest SEO mistake, and despite the emphasis given by both Google and Bing, still, some websites do not provide unique titles for each page.
The most common mistakes are:
- Having all pages under the same title.
- Including the website name in the page title (it’s ok to do that for the homepage, but it’s not needed for the rest of the pages).
- Making the page titles more than 65 characters in length.
- Descriptions should be unique (between 150-160 characters), non-keyword-stuffed, and attractive to the user.
A good description can increase your click-through rate (CTR), and if your content delivers what is promised in the description, it is more likely to have high conversions as well.
Slow Loading Website:
Nowadays, technology allows folks to acquire what they desire at the drop of a hat. When someone visits your website, they are supposed to see everything in the blink of an eye. Google has also stated that 53 percent of mobile website visitors leave the site if the site takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your videos, images, pages, call-to-actions, or other elements load bit by bit, you may risk losing their attention and can lose your business as well. Make sure your site has the fastest loading time.
Not Using Anchor Text for Internal Links:
Have you ever seen links in the body of a web page for “click here,” this post,” and other generic text?
From an SEO perspective, it’s a waste. Sure, using a call to action as your link may increase clicks, but it also costs you the opportunity of tailoring your anchor text, one of the most important components of SEO.
For example, if you write a blog post and you want to link to your e-commerce services page, make the anchor text “e-commerce website design services” or something similar. Also, if you absolutely must have a call to action, try to at least include some relevant keywords in the link. For example, “click here to learn more about our eCommerce services”.
Not focusing on getting quality backlinks:
I am not a big fan of the term “link building”. In fact, I don’t even like to hear it, I like to use the term promotion instead.
Nevertheless, the reality is the same. Whether you call it link building, off-page SEO or promotion, it is one of the most important processes if you want to achieve high rankings, especially in Google.
When building links, don’t make the following SEO mistakes:
- Don’t build too many links too fast. The whole process needs to be natural, and it is not natural for a 3-month-old website to have tons of links pointing to it. Go slow and steady.
- Don’t use keyword anchor text links. In the near past, keyword anchor text links were very important for rankings, but now, if you have many of those, you can get a penalty instead.
- Don’t direct all your links to your home page. Diversification is a better practice.
- Don’t buy or exchange links with other bloggers and don’t participate in any link scheme (either free or paid).
Not Optimizing URLs or Site Structure:
Often, when building a new website, your web developer doesn’t integrate the best SEO practices into the website structure. This is totally understandable because the web developer is not an SEO specialist. Therefore, an overlooked facet of site architecture (in other words, the way the website is laid out and how the pages connect) is fairly common.
I would argue it’s the single most underrated area of SEO.
In general, the home page of your site is going to have the most authority because it’s going to have the most incoming links and the best quality of inbound links. Authority (or link juice) flows throughout a website from high authority pages to low authority pages through links. For every step away a web page is from the home page, the less and less of that total authority is going to be passed to it. All other factors being equal, the further away the page is from the home page, the worse it will rank.
I’ve seen cases of high authority web pages being buried deep in site architecture and losing rankings dramatically. I’ve also seen the reverse, where web pages are moved closer to the home page and suddenly jump several spots in Google. Ultimately, you want to create your website structure so it is easy and intuitive to navigate for users.
A flat structure often satisfies that requirement and will help you get more of those users to your site through search engines.
Forgetting Mobile Users:
Whether you’re a B2C or B2B brand, much of your audience is likely using a mobile device to find good content. If your content isn’t mobile-friendly, the user experience will be negatively impacted.
Take steps to ensure that your website and its content are mobile-friendly and responsive. Also, focus on creating content for users who would typically use a mobile device.
You are not active on Social Media:
Social media is one of the best and most effective ways to promote your website or new content.
It is a huge mistake if you are not active on at least one social media platform.
Most SEO experts agree that social signals are gaining more ground as a ranking factor, and besides the hidden SEO benefits, social media is also a good source of traffic.
You don’t have to be active in all networks or spend a lot of time socializing without a purpose.
You need to find which platform is best suited to your audience and try to build authority and trust by following the leaders in your niche and sharing informative and useful content.
Expecting Instant Results:
An SEO strategy is always a long-term strategy; it means that it will take some time to settle into search engines and to see the outcome. Many SEO professionals make this mistake and expect instant results as soon as they execute something new, but that’s rarely seen in the case of SEO. Once you make any amendment, give some time to your effort to create an impact.
Forgetting About Analytics:
Last but not least, the only way to know if your SEO optimization and content efforts work is to track their progress. Many marketers would disregard the numbers, but this is a serious mistake. Setting up and regularly reviewing your analytics is essential for your optimization results.
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are just two of the main tools you can use to measure and get an overview of your website’s performance. With their help, you can see how your optimization is working for the different kinds of content and using various strategies you are trying out.
Conclusion:
For sure, the above list is not 100% correct. There are many more SEO mistakes that even experienced webmasters miss. Nevertheless, the above mistakes are the most important.
In addition, it is almost certain that when these mistakes are corrected, the benefits to your website will be immediate.
Build a Better Paintball Website
Here at eMUNICATIONS, we love to play paintball. The game has a lot to offer: teamwork, adrenaline, exercise, and good old-fashioned sunlight (something usually alien to the eMUNICATIONS team).
Naturally, we also like good quality websites (something usually alien to the paintball community). Most paintball websites I’ve come across are in a state of disrepair — there’s usually little to no thought of the end-user, core information is hard to find, and very few of them are using social media in a useful way.
Until recently, most field owners I’ve talked with seem to dismiss their website as an afterthought. This wouldn’t have been a major problem five years ago, but in today’s world, the quality of your website is just as important as the quality of your field.
Not everyone has an eye for design, but when your online presence is clean and professional, it communicates that your business is clean and professional. You may not want to pay for professional design in order to cut costs, but avoiding this expense will only help your costs in the short term; your revenue will suffer in the long term.
One of the biggest frustrations I’ve experienced with paintball field websites is the lack of pertinent information or poor placement thereof. Within the first five seconds of viewing a website, the user should be able to identify your field’s hours, prices, location, and contact information. Some paintball fields keep wacky hours or will open up on random days, and they don’t do a good job of letting their customers know when these things occur. This is where social media comes into play.
Many field owners are reluctant to use social media — some dismiss it as hype, some are intimidated by it, while others simply don’t care. Facebook, for example, is a great way to let your customers know of any unscheduled open days or last-minute changes of field hours. It’s also a great way to get more people to your field and more people looking at your business.
One of the latest social media services is “location-based”. Companies like Gowalla, Foursquare, and now Facebook are all working in the location-based realm, and this sort of thing is VERY advantageous for paintball field owners. These services allow users to “check in” where they are. So they’ll broadcast to every one of their friends, “I’m at Joe’s Paintball Park”, which is a clickable link with your field’s contact information. If only five customers check in, that’s generally at least 300 people who were exposed to your company. You can even create an offer like this: “x% off admission when you check in using Facebook.”
So, paintball field owners, you have a lot of work ahead of you and a lot of new players to catch the attention of. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Want to know more? Drop us a line.
See you on the field!
jQuery Quickie For Zebra Highlighting In Tables
If you haven’t taken the time to check out this framework you absolutely must do so now. jQuery allows you to accomplish so much more with so much little. It may be a little arcane to look at the first time, but after a little research, you’ll wonder how you lived without it. Case in point, here’s a quick script to add zebra highlighting to a table with id ‘myTable’.
// Do zebra highlighting
$(“#myTableID tr:even”).addClass(‘altrow’);
This code can be added to an existing page and automagically apply the styles necessary. (You’ll still have to define the style in your css)
While you can do something similar using just CSS using the :even pseudoselector, it is not as universally supported. And jQuery will allow you to do far more than simply alternate table colors.
Google Analytics Reports You Should Be Analysing To Improve Your Marketing
You may be using Google Analytics, but are you sure that you are using it to its full potential?
Google Analytics provides users with the ability to measure every aspect of a website, from unique visitors to referral sources, to bounce rates, device types, time on page, click through rates, and so much more. Knowing which reports analyzing can be difficult when you’re wading through so much data.
To help you out, we have put together a list of custom and standard reports. With this, you’ll be able to quickly draw actionable marketing ideas to improve your results. And get better insight into your marketing performance.
- Mobile Overview Report:
Considering that mobile internet users now outpace desktop, it’s fairly safe to assume that your mobile and tablet experiences need to be as good (if not better) than the one for desktop users.
If your mobile visitor numbers are growing, it’s a good sign that your website is healthy and will likely rank well in Google Search.
Accessing this report is easy to follow these steps.
- Step 1: After clicking on the Audience section, go all the way towards the bottom to find the Mobile > Overview.
- Step 2: Now select your primary conversion goal under the appropriately named Conversions section.
- Step 3: The first place to look for discrepancies between devices is in the engagement or Behavior section.
Significantly lower numbers on mobile and tablet (vs. Desktop) is your first clue to a poor mobile experience.
- Traffic Acquisition Report:
It’s important to know what channels are producing traffic to your website. When looking at a specific date range for this report, be sure to compare to the previous year to see how your traffic compares to the same dates last year. This way you can see website improvements over a particular time.
This report is especially important if traffic is down since it will help you see what channels have changed.
“Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.
- Audience Behaviour Report – NEW VS. RETURNING:
Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers, and customers.
This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.
You can find it by going to the Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.
Why is this significant? Returning visitors are more engaged in your content, and they’re more likely to take an action such as filling out a form or making a purchase, than a new visitor.
- Landing Pages – Bounce Rate:
It’s important to know which pages people are visiting and spending time on versus pages where they land and immediately leave. It’s best to view your top landing pages and analyze which ones are contributing to your website’s high bounce rate. Once you identify the pages that are causing users to leave, focus on fixing those pages to keep users more engaged on that page such as adding more targeted content, images and a call to action.
Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.
If the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high-bounce-rate pages more engaging.
- Top Search Pages Leaking Visitors:
As we’ve seen so far, visitors don’t always do what we expect them to. And they don’t always find what they’re looking for.
That’s evidenced by high bounce rates, especially on important pages that are bringing in a ton of traffic to your site.
Finding those pages that (a) rank highly, (b) bring tons of traffic, but (c) fail to convert them could give you another quick boost of new leads or customers.
- Step 1: Start by locating your most popular content under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
- Step 2: Now we’re going to use another filtering or sorting tool to make this information more relevant. “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.
- Step 3: This will give you a visual comparison between the bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.
Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar and so on).
Conclusion:
Don’t worry about running A/B tests. And don’t waste time with a new page or content creation.
First, go back and fix all the stuff that’s not working. The poor device experiences. The high potential pages or posts are hidden from the world on Google’s page. And the popular pages that people are leaving immediately in droves.
Next, connect the dots by getting people from the most popular pages and paths to your pages that convert (or assist conversions) the highest.
Raw data, by itself, is meaningless. But using these five simple reports can help you layer in context and gain actionable insight that has the power to increase leads and sales literally overnight.
How High-Quality Content Impacts your Website SEO
Nowadays, in times of digital marketing, companies definitely prefer to use SEO. But, for best results, it is essential that the content available on the site is not only relevant but also something that will attract the clients. The site content should be such that it will allow the SEO to promote the site and allow the clients to understand the company and its services, encouraging interactions.
When it comes to SEO, We hear Content is the king for engaging the users and thus good quality content in SEO holds a prominent place. All the SEO tips advocate about posting high-quality, relevant and unique content, which should engage the users instantly.
When it comes to most of people content strategy they always think the more content they have the better their search rankings will be. However, search engines know better than that and you should always choose quality over quantity.
What is high-quality content?
To answer this question, Google’s Hummingbird update, along with the removal of the keyword tool. had emphasized quality content as a deciding factor for ranking well. And Google’s quality guidelines clearly mentioned out what they’re looking for.
Here are their exact words:
- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
- Don’t deceive your users.
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.
Content isn’t just frequently updating your website with blogs, videos or images. While that can be good for your website, search engines decide what makes your content worthy. Are you creating the same content that can be found on other sites? Is your content providing value to its visitors? Is your content relatable and unique? Is it answering the questions that someone is searching for? Fresh, interesting, easy to read, and credible content with the right number of keywords impacts the quality of content. Remember, high-quality content provides a valuable experience to its’ visitors.
So the message is clear: Focus on content, not keywords.
What is low-quality content in SEO?
Low-quality content, on the other hand, is only concerned about stuffing the keywords in such a way that it is spotted by the search engines, thus helping in boosting the rankings. It has nothing to do with the user experience and this is the reason why most of the times low-quality content ends up in achieving nothing. It has duplication issues, poor grammar, meaningless sentences, etc.
Any content does not meet these criteria is most likely low quality for SEO:
- There is not enough main content on the page to satisfy the searcher.
- The main content is not very good. Someone searching for something is unsatisfied by the content.
- Perhaps the main content is good, but there are too many ads and pop-ups for the user to have a satisfying experience. The page is slow to load, or hard to read.
- It is difficult to find out who is responsible for the website or the page content, and there is no good reason for anonymity.
- The website has a negative reputation.
How does this affect SEO?
when quality content is created, it drastically improves your visibility. And without visibility and exposure, your content is just another one of the millions of articles that are posted every day on the web. Nobody sees it, Nobody shares it, Nobody does anything with it. Search engines care about the user experience. Their goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between you and the knowledge you seek. Google looks at the overall expertise, authority, and trust of a site. They call this E-A-T for short.
When evaluating the main content of a page, they look at:
- The quality of information on a website.
- The quantity of information on a site.
- The external reputation of a website.
- The internal information on a website.
If you want visibility and exposure, you have to commit yourself to the grind of consistently creating quality content.
How do you develop high-quality content?
With good content dominating search engines, you’ll need to invest time and money into developing high-quality content. Think outside the box, use other creative tactics, and try to become an industry expert to be considered a trustworthy resource, which will then lead to higher search rankings.
So, focus on this point:
- Get to know your readers.
- Keep the focus on customers, not selling.
- Create content regularly.
- Create content for every stage of the sales funnel.
- Talk in their language.
How Do You Know If You Have a Piece of Quality Content?
Here’s a great benchmark for judging whether you have a piece of quality content or not. If someone reads that page, are they going to change the way that they approach their business or problem? A piece of content that compels someone to change their business strategy or influence their decision-making can be considered high-quality.
Conclusion:
In the end, quality content isn’t about a sales pitch. It’s about establishing trust and authority. Quality content should be all about solving a problem, addressing an issue, or offering up original research.
