SEO is no longer the jargon for website owners it once was. When it’s all about SEO, every site owner pretends to be an expert and makes fatal mistakes. Basically, beginners are more prone to making certain mistakes that can cost them their hard work. These errors can have serious consequences for search engines such as Google and may result in the site being removed from search results.
5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs Here are a few common SEO mistakes that should be avoided at all costs in order to keep your site ranking on Google and other search engines.
- Creating paid and unnatural links
- Using hidden keywords
- Stuffing keywords in articles
- Copying Content and Using the Article Count
- Don’t care about on-page optimization
5 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
1. Create unnatural links
Most people start websites to blog and start an online business. Either way, getting decent traffic to a site will take a significant amount of time, even if Google has started showing that site in search results. To rank well on Google, a website needs a good reputation and external links. This is an external factor that the site owner has much less influence on. The more quality content, the more quality backlinks automatically.
Unfortunately, it works the other way around when people misunderstand the concept of external links. They try to create unnatural links themselves through SEO agencies and link exchange platforms.
Google has a very clear stance on taking action against sites that have unnatural links built in a short amount of time. You can look through the hundreds of discussions on the Google Products Forum on this topic to understand the reality of creating paid or spammy links.
1. Create spam links
So, the first SEO mistake: never try to create unnatural links that can lead to your site being removed from search results. Wait a while to drive organic traffic to your site to start your online career.
2. Use of hidden keywords
You will be surprised to see what people do to rank well on Google. The worst black hat SEO method is to use white content or a very small 1 pixel font. When we were browsing one of the client’s websites, we found that the owner of the site was using text with white fonts. His intention was to rank #1 on Google for local search keywords.
His site was well outside the top 20 results on page three for the specific keywords “Texas Restaurants”. We cleaned up the site and resubmitted it to Google and the result was amazing. The site was moved to the first page of number six in a week due to the same content as it.
But there can be bad execution sequences for such ugly methods. Google may mark your site as web spam and remove it from search results or downvote it. If you see that your Google Search Console account has manual anti-spam measures in place, then the only way is to submit a revalidation request after your site has been cleaned up. This process typically takes months, as millions of revalidation requests will be manually processed by Google’s anti-spam team.
2. Using hidden text
So the second SEO mistake: make sure your content is readable on all devices and avoid using white fonts with a white background to hide your target keywords.
3. Keyword stuffing
While hiding keywords is an invisible way to make a mistake, keyword stuffing is a visible way to make the same mistake. As a rule, write an article for your audience and for search engines. When you write about SEO, there should be several instances of the word “SEO” in this article. What you need to do is keep track of instances and make sure keywords aren’t used too often in an article. This is commonly referred to as keyword density and the acceptable range is only 5-10%. When you use 20% of the words in an article as a keyword, the article will surely move down in the search results.
Hundreds of articles with such a high keyword density written for search engines will make your site look bad for Google.
3. Stuffing keywords
So, the third mistake of SEO is to write articles for users and not for search engines. Use keyword and keyword density planning tools to write an SEO-efficient article for your readers.
4. Copying content or creating articles
Running a successful website requires an investment of time, money and effort in the right direction. As the site began to grow in size, the biggest challenge for individual site owners was to maintain the frequency of updates. One person cannot write articles and maintain a larger site, such as 1 million visitors per month. Thus, some time-consuming activities, such as writing articles, must be outsourced to third parties in order to focus on other key activities.
It can also happen that you immediately launch the site using third-party content authors. People also buy existing sites and start maintaining them to work with freelancers.
In any case, getting a quality content writer on a cheap basis is really difficult. Either you need to spend a lot of money or hire passionate people that you like.
We tested this with cheap sites like Freelancer.com and found that 90% of bidders either don’t have the necessary skills or are reproducing articles from other sites. Never rely on tools like Copyscape to believe content was originally written. There are tools like the article spinner that can rotate words in a sentence to create a new sentence and pass it to Copyscape.
If you maintain the site yourself, please ensure that you do not reproduce or copy content from other sites. This will lead to the notorious result that your site will be permanently excluded from search results.
4. Using copied content
So, the fourth SEO mistake is not to copy articles from other sites. When you use freelancers, make sure you pay more and get quality and original content.
5. Bad SEO on the page
Publishing an article online is completely different from writing an essay for a school exam. Be sure to review each article before posting and confirm that you are following certain on-page SEO practices. In addition to the keyword, there are many other factors on a page that determine search rankings:
- Don’t use a unique and descriptive title and meta description for every page on your site.
- Using images without alt text or stealing from other sites.
- Do not use target keywords in the title, meta description, and URL.
- Do not structure content with appropriate headings and subheadings.
- Publication of articles with grammatical and spelling errors with poor readability.
All search engines show the title, meta description, and URL on the results page. In some cases, the URL will be replaced with the breadcrumb structure used on the page. So using a repetitive or non-descriptive title and meta description will result in low rankings. Also, users won’t click on results if they don’t like them, which will result in a loss of valuable traffic.
5. Ignoring On-Page Optimization
So, the fifth SEO mistake: use simple page optimization steps to succeed in search rankings. Use tools to model how a page will look in search results before publishing.
Conclusion
Above are five common SEO mistakes that we have noticed people make. Focusing on black hat techniques without taking care of page optimization will result in search engines penalizing your site. Getting a site back in the search results after being penalized is not an easy task. Because prevention is better than cure, it’s a good idea to follow simple guidelines when optimizing your site. Not only will this help maintain your site’s reputation, but it will also attract traffic, thereby increasing your chances of attracting more customers.