Top SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Categorized in: SEO

These days, SEO is still important, but many businesses don’t even think about it anymore. They have certain assumptions about SEO that make them believe they shouldn’t really work on it. Those who do work on it, though, may not fill understand what they need to do. They could leave their SEO half-finished, for example, without even realizing it, or they could be making crucial errors in judgment. Here’s a look at some of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen so that you can avoid them:

Not Monitoring Your Backlink Portfolio

These days, backlinks are still important for SEO, but it can’t be forced. You have to try to attract great backlinks without looking like you’re trying. This essentially means that your website and business create value in people’s lives. For most businesses, this means creating good content.

There’s a flip side to backlinks, though. They can do more harm than good if they are poor quality. So, it is an error to assume that all backlinks are good links. You need to monitor your backlink portfolio to assess the health of your SEO. Bad backlinks can have a negative impact on your SEO.

When you see a bad backlink, you’ll want to “disavow” it through Google. Although it doesn’t delete the backlinks, it gives you a chance to explain to Google that you had nothing to do with obtaining that backlink, which can help your SEO.

Thinking of Mobile Optimization as an Afterthought

These days, it’s pretty standard to have responsive themes that look good across all devices. However, just because it is pretty standard doesn’t mean that this is executed well. We’ve seen responsive themes that look terrible across some of the devices.

Developers need to double check and make sure they look good across all platforms. These days, more and more people use mobile devices to view content, so it’s even more important than ever. If it doesn’t look good on a certain device, that could negatively impact your SEO.

To really understand what is going on, if you can obtain data about how much of your website traffic is from mobile devices, this can give you clarity about how important this is. We’ve seen some websites getting as much as 80% of their traffic from mobile. If your mobile version doesn’t look good, it could seriously impact your traffic (in a bad way).

Not Understanding How to Use Keywords

These days, keywords can be a somewhat tricky concept to understand. When optimizing a page, you have to keep keywords in mind just enough so that your knowledge of the keywords for the page can direct your content in a positive way. They should serve as pointers, naturally worked into the content, and designed to increase your chances of connecting with your target audience.

Furthermore, they don’t need to appear exactly on the page in order to have your site returned in the search engines for those keywords. You just need to focus on intent and relevance, meaning that your audience needs to be first. Create content that matches the intent and audience of the page and the keywords will follow.

It is a good idea to know what some of the common mistakes people make with SEO are so you can avoid them!