Search engine optimization remains an extremely competitive sport and most webmasters would agree to the fact that there is a very little margin for errors in this business. Modern internet marketing practises have evolved in a similar form like we did from chimps, but the belief to acceptance ratio still instils paranoia among the so called “SEO experts”, and mustering enough knowledge to say that you are well versed with the Google way isn’t something that we acknowledge every day. Some SEO errors are funny while some are serious, through this article we will cover a new take at the most widespread mistakes that SEOs based across the globe make. Personally, I hope you are not making these SEO blunders.
#1 Content Duplicacy
Plenty has been said about this already, but this isn’t just about optimizing your site’s content. Most of the time content duplicacy issues pop up because of messy coding or neglecting to configure your Content Management System (CMS) or basically not understanding that managing it is vital. Duplicate content might be characterized as having the same content, or about the same content, showing up on two separate URLs. This agenda was the reason that led to Google rolling out its Panda update, which recently received another update in the form of Panda 4.0.
Things to do –
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Unique content on all pages within a same domain.
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Configuring CMS wisely, all content should be schema optimized.
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Avoid sloppy site programming. Make it better suited with Google Webmaster Guidelines.
#2 Acting Without Enough Research
A lot of rumors circulate every day in the search marketing landscape, and molding your strategy based on a viral post about SEO rumors or myths without conducting enough research could dampen your years of SEO work. This happens to distributers who read something online that provides them some erroneous data about a new algorithm break. The Best example would be the published articles saying that Facebook Likes are utilized by Google as a ranking indicator, which seems like an incredible thought, yet being a spoilsport I’m afraid to confidently advertize that Google can’t really recognize Facebook Likes.
Unfortunately, these articles lead to individuals reworking out entire SEO systems based around rumors. For instance, many will start blowing out money to get more Facebook likes without even checking if the thing is for real or not.
Things to do –
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Stop blindly following controversial articles and authors.
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Wait for expert opinions from the influencer audience.
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Do your own research and find out.
#3 Stop Thinking From The User Perspective
Sometimes as webmasters, we get so involved with search engine marketing and understanding search algorithm, we fail at the basic guidelines by Google – “Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.”
Hence, all our SEO related work should be centered around offering the best user experience to the site’s visitors. Focusing only on SEO and ignoring user experience cannot work in tandem. It’s similar to whatever else might be available in life when you try too hard, the returns reduce quickly, and in the end get negative. Likewise, web search enviroment is changing constantly, so its best to concentrate on what the search engines are truly searching for, which is the thing that sites/pages which are the best comes about for them to give clients who enter in a given pursuit question.
Things to do –
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Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines
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Understand the Google Webmaster Guidelines
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Follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines
#4 Content is present and yet absent
Content that is not working is just as good as absent. At present, everybody is stressing on the fact how “Content Is The King” or just why the next generation SEO will be centered around a content strategy. Thin content is a major issue, and many websites have squandered their ranking owing to thin or low quality content. E-commerce websites are a great example of a site having pages with little or no content, and many big players lost their search positioning due to this.
Search engines find pages with little content to be trailing low in quality. Truth be told, this is prone to happen to your website if your web pages have small content that doesn’t exactly say anything about you or your business. Hence, it is advisable to stay away from having poor quality thin on your website!
Things to do –
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Conduct a content audit of your site
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Identify pages with thin content
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Optimize content while thinking about the user experience
