4 Extremely Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

Search engine optimization (SEO) is necessary if you want any part of your website to rank highly in Google searches. If you’re not on the first page of Google results for the keywords you’ve chosen, you’re nearly invisible to searchers.

You may know some of the brighter points about what to do to have good SEO, like having consistent, fresh content and using relevant keywords, but today we’re going to look at huge SEO mistakes we see people make, and which should be avoided at all costs. Whether you work with us or not, take heed of these tips.

1. No SEO At All

The most common form of bad SEO is to have no SEO at all. This means the website has been left in it’s most basic, original state.

None of the titles or descriptions have been updated, so they are generic and unoriginal, e.g. Home, About Us, Contact, Blog, Services, Products, etc.

The descriptions might be something like, “We provide solutions for clients to help them succeed.”

Some of the content might even be left over from the development process of the website. Placeholder content such as the fake Latin “Lorem Ipsum” is common in the web development world, but can be accidentally left behind and make your website even more confusing.

No keywords will be specified, or if they are they are far too general. Not having any SEO makes it hard for search engines – as well as your customers – to understand what you website is about, leading people to leave your website very quickly without contacting you.

2. Duplicate Titles/Descriptions/Content

One of the worst mistakes which can be made is duplicating content. Whether it’s the titles of pages, the descriptions or the words on the page itself, duplicating content is a lazy way to create volume.

When content is a copy of another page, search engines will notice and only index one of the pages, meaning the effort put into creating the duplicate pages was wasted anyways. And if the content was duplicated from another, pre-existing site, none of your content may be indexed at all in favor of the original content.

Individual users will also be repelled by duplicate content. No one wants to go to a new page, only to find the same exact material as was previously covered. That would be like opening a book to page 52 and finding out the author simply started over with Chapter 1 at that point. That book wouldn’t sell a lot of copies.

3. Still Using Meta Keywords

Meta keywords were heavily used in the 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s to help search engines and searchers understand what a webpage was about. While the meta keywords form can still be filled in with keywords, it can now be more damaging to your ranking than helpful.

Most major search engines no longer use meta keywords to help them rank webpages; they instead check the content to decide what a webpage is about.

By continuing to use meta keywords, you can confuse search engines and possibly searchers, because your meta keywords may not match up perfectly with the topic of your content.

4. Keyword Stuffin

Keyword stuffing is the practice of taking a keyword or keyphrase – think “Cars” or “Used Cars For Sale In California” – and sprinkling it heavily throughout the content of a page, as well as in the description, meta keyword section and/or title.

Instead, it’s best to write about a content naturally, and let the keyword appear a few times naturally throughout the content. There is no longer a hard-and-fast rule about how many times a keyword should appear in content, as long as the content is valuable for the reader and brings people to your page.

If you’d like to learn more about how to create good SEO on your website, give us a call or email us today!