SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is at the forefront of most business owners’ minds nowadays. It can make or break a company, boosting profits when successful and seeing your site struggle to receive traffic when it’s neglected.
It’s also extremely easy to get wrong and so many people make mistakes when it comes to their own SEO. Here are a few of the most common to avoid!
Poor Web Design
Carefully thought out web design is essential when it comes to SEO. At the end of the day, your site is pretty useless if it can’t be indexed by search engines. Google and other engine’s “spiders” or “bots” need to be able to crawl through your website easily in order to pick up any keywords listed in your website’s content.
You want to ensure that duplicate content isn’t indexed, that the pages you want to be crawled can be crawled, and that pages that are irrelevant are not accessible to be crawled. Put simply, you will generally need to use robot files and tags to achieve this.
Look for a web designer who specializes in SEO who will be able to help you to achieve this by ensuring your site can be indexed and crawled properly by all search engines.
Weak Meta Descriptions
You really should be spending a lot of time mulling over your meta descriptions. If you haven’t heard of a meta description before, it’s 160-word snippet (or more depending on Google’s mood) that describes a given page on your website. If you search on most search engines, you may find meta descriptions beneath the main link you’re offered.
Now, Google doesn’t really use meta descriptions to organize and rank pages according to relevancy. However, consumers use meta descriptions to decide which of the pages pulled up by Google seems most appropriate for their needs.
Make sure your meta description contains keywords and accurately summarizes the given page it’s being attributed to.
This will boost your click-through rate (which is the end goal of SEO anyway) and when you receive more clicks through to your page, you’ll naturally and organically rise in search engine results.
Wasted Schema Data
Schema markup is code that can be placed on your website to help search engines provide users with more informative results. It was created specifically with users in mind, so it’s not all too surprising that search engines are enthusiastic about it!
It tells search engines what your data means rather than simply what it says. For example, you may want to optimize your brand name – schema data ensures that Google knows what your brand name actually represents, what you specialize in, what you sell.
Unsurprisingly, it’s one of the most powerful SEO tools out there. But so many people forget to incorporate it into their site! Make sure to use a schema markup coding specialist to implement it into yours!
Falling Behind the SEO Learning Curve
Perhaps the biggest mistake that people make when it comes to SEO is falling behind the curve.
Sure, you can conduct a whole lot of research into search engine optimization. You could become an expert in everything to do with the subject. But if you stop keeping an eye on current trends in SEO, you’ll quickly find yourself out of the loop and wondering why your techniques aren’t working anymore.
You need to keep up-to-date with changes to the way search engines work and how you can best optimize your site to maintain your rankings and authority. Remember that Google is savvy and it’s becoming aware of how people are working its search engines to their advantage.
Be Consistent & Take No Shortcuts
Remember that not all website owners will optimize their sites and content for SEO appropriately. Some will overload their pages with keywords, they’ll make use of clickbait titles to generate traffic to their pages and they may not be offering genuinely valuable content to the final readership.
If your site is optimized properly from the ground up, that gives you a big advantage.
While it can be pretty easy to miss important steps when it comes to SEO, if you watch out for these common mistakes, you’ll be able to avoid them in your own SEO marketing plan. There are no shortcuts. Set aside time in this area for your business/brand or hire a marketing firm that knows how to incorporate best SEO practices into their web design.
It’s an investment that will pay off in the long run, helping you to increase traffic to your site while improving overall conversion rates & profits.
