Digital marketing is quickly becoming an essential method for promoting products and services. With millions of people online at any given time, you need to make it easy to find your website in order to tap such a juicy market.
Your website may have the best design and the most comprehensive content in your industry, but it is useless if no one can find it with their favorite search engines. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. Optimizing your website will help your website rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and increase your website traffic.
However, SEO is like a flaming sword with no handle; use it correctly and you will reap the rewards. Abuse it and you will give yourself horrid burns from which there is little hope of recovery. To help you avoid the pitfalls of SEO, I've listed 12 dangerous SEO mistakes:
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keywords are important in SEO because they help your potential customers find your website when they use search engines. You need to use keywords that are relevant to the kind of service and/or product that your company provides in key places such as in the title of pages. However, due to the ease with which they can be abused, search engines no longer place as much value on them as they once did when computing the website rankings. On the contrary, keyword stuffing could cause your page to rank lower in search results.
Online marketers usually make the mistake of either putting too many keywords in their content or placing them too close together. Ideally, you should only use keywords three to four times per page and just use synonyms if needed.
2. Keyword Cannibalization
Another SEO mistake that beginner online marketers make concerning keywords is using the same search term repeatedly across multiple pages. For example, you want to rank for “specialty coffee”, so you use that keyword in ten different pages on your website. But doing so confuses search engines as to which page is the most relevant for users searching for that term. As much as possible, you need to focus on a unique keyword or variation for each page on the website so that search engines are able to clearly associate a keyword with a given page.
3. Not Doing Keyword Research You may think that they can just use whatever keyword they can think of, just as long as it has a connection with your business. This is just plain wrong. SEO is tough and spending precious time and money on the wrong keywords is a recipe for failure. Keyword research lets you know if the keywords you optimize for are actually being used by your target customers, how many people are using those keywords, and how difficult it would be to rank against your competitors. Do your research.
4. Using Plagiarized Content
Sharing articles from other websites is only acceptable when you do it in your personal social networking accounts; if you do this in online marketing, it will only get you in hot water. You should never copy content from other websites and claim them as your own.
Another mistake that is similar to this is putting the same content in different pages of their website. Sure, this makes their websites look extensive, but it actually does nothing to improve your search engine rankings.
5. Using Link Farms
Link farms are groups of websites that hyperlink each other’s content. They do this because search engines put a premium on the number of backlinks a website has; they believe that this is a sign that they are authorities in their niches. However, when (not if) the search engines catch wind that your website uses link farms they will blacklist you from their indexes.
You should grow your backlinks organically by developing high quality content that is relevant to your target market and interacting with other webmasters to link to your content.
6. Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice of inserting keywords that do not fit into the content (imagine searching for ‘car repainting services’ but getting an article about ‘used car sales’). Not only is this practice annoying, but it is also a quick way to get search engines to blacklist your website.
7. Using Broken Links
Nothing is more mildly infuriating as clicking on a link only to find that the page it points to no longer exists. Of course, you won’t knowingly link to a broken web page, but after some time some of the links in your website will get broken. Broken links will not only annoy your visitors, search engines actually lower the rankings of websites that have these kinds of issues. Thankfully, there are plenty of available browser plugins that can help you identify broken links.
8. Not Using Internal Links
Besides links that point to other websites, you can also use internal links to help improve your SERP rankings. Internal links are those that redirect the user to another page in your website. Just make sure that you limit the number of internal links in one page; 2 to 4 is fine, more than 6 is already excessive.
9. Linking to “Bad Websites”
Although linking to other websites could help your website’s ranking because the search engines are better able to determine the subject of your website, you must be careful when choosing which websites you link with your own. If the search engines have a website tagged for being a constant rule breaker, they will treat the other sites linked to it the same way. So choose where you link out to because you might be unconsciously hurting your rankings.
10. Ignoring Analytics
One does not simply put up a website and leave it to its own devices. If you want your website to become profitable then you need to monitor its performance regularly. Use online analytics tools to find out which parts of your website are under-performing and fix them immediately. There are dozens of useful tools that you can use to review your website’s performance, like the ones provided by Google.
11. Linking to Unrelated Websites
You should only add links to websites related to your content. Adding links to random websites, even if you do it organically, will only get your website flagged as a site that accepts payment or favors to get links, which is a violation of the webmaster policies of most search engines.
12. Optimizing Solely for Search Engines
This is the biggest blunder that you can ever make in SEO. What good is a highly visible website if the content is useless or the usability terrible? You should optimize your website first for the users, and then optimize it for the search engines. The users are, after all, your main sources of income, so you should make them feel at home in your website before anything else.
These are just some of the do’s and don’ts regarding SEO; follow them and they can increase the traffic coming into your website significantly, use them the wrong way and you might find yourself in a lot of trouble.