Top SEO Mistakes to Avoid!

With the advent of internet, competition amongst businesses has gone to another level. There are billions of websites offering the same services/products and catering to the same target audience. This competitive online landscape has increased the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) like never before. Today, SEO is an indispensable ingredient for any business’s success. It boosts search engine rankings, targeted flow of traffic and sales of your business. However, many businesses even after implementing SEO don’t reap its benefits. Consequently, practicing SEO is essential but having knowledge of the common pitfalls to avoid is even more critical. Below are some of the most common SEO mistakes that businesses should avoid:

1) Duplicate Content:

Whilst content is one of the key elements that boosts search engine ranking, it poses a severe threat of penalty if the content found on the website is duplicated. Duplicate content involves the same content being used on different pages of the same website or on different websites. If you have two pages on your website based on one topic and targeting the same keywords, it is better to consolidate both the pages into one. Alternatively, write original content for both the pages. The problem with duplicated content is that it confuses search engines as to which pages to index. In addition to original web content, meta tags, meta description and title tags should also be original. To avoid being penalized and to check if the content you are posting is unique, pass the content to plagiarism checker tools such as Copyscape, Copysentry, and Plagscan, amongst others.

2) Stuffing Keywords and Irrelevance:

As the main job of SEO companies is to rank your business higher on certain keywords, some of them stuff keywords on the entire website and related article sites.  More importantly, in the pretext of gaining high search engine ranking, such companies adopt unethical SEO practices such as targeting keywords with irrelevant content. In an attempt of misguiding users and search engines, Google penalizes the website as a spammer which is a severe blow to their business.

3) Automated Link Building:

Link building services are one of the essential SEO tactics that drive web traffic and boost search engine rankings. However, links built with mass automated directory submissions, social bookmarking submissions and article submissions do more harm than good. Whilst, there are many sites that offer thousands of submissions at extremely affordable rates, they are unreliable as they prefer spamming over manual submission. Hence, even though manual submission of articles and directories take time and more effort, it is more reliable and preferable over automated link building.

4) Over-optimisation of Keyword Anchor Text:

Whilst optimization of anchor text is vital, over-optimising it can severely affect search engine rankings. Using the same keyword anchor text to build backlinks will undermine all your efforts as search engine would consider it as spam. SEO companies should adopt variation in anchor text by rotating and mixing keywords to avoid being labelled as spam.

So, if you are already doing SEO for your website but are unable to rank higher on search engines, the above might be some of SEO mistakes you might be committing.

Bal Rai is an Internet Marketing Consultant at eTrack Media, one of the leading SEO companies in Mumbai, India that provides search engine optimisation and link building services to clients in Redditch, Bromsgrove, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and the West Midlands.