Bury Your Website With These SEO Mistakes

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important strategies for driving traffic to your website. You don’t want to spend time and money on tactics that harm your rankings. Develop a good working understanding of SEO best practices to avoid these devastating mistakes.

Ignoring Bing

Google is the most widely used search engine, but it isn’t the only one that matters. Last year, 67 percent of searches went through Google, but users also use Yahoo! and Bing. Register your site with all three.

Posting Inferior Content

Content might be king, but only good content influences your rankings in the right direction. Websites with high-quality content experience 7.8 times more traffic than sites with content that’s only so-so.

If you post copied content, search engines will identify your site as one that plagiarizes the work of others and penalize you by moving your site down in rankings. Create content that is unique, and if you curate content from other sites, refresh it with your own insight and individuality.

Neglecting Keyword Research

Even if your content is unique, compelling, and well-written, without relevant keywords your audience might not be able to find it. Research what they’re looking for and insert the right keywords so search engines can direct them to your material. Google Trends and Adwords provide tools that keep you up to date on what’s trending.

Stuffing Content with Keywords

Don’t use keywords repeatedly in your content. It makes your material hard to read and often hurts your page’s search performance. Google Panda and other updates prefer readable texts. It recognizes synonyms for keywords, so use them whenever you can. Yoast SEO can help measure keyword density to keep it under 2.5 percent.

Check webpages and previous blog posts to make sure they aren’t so keyword dense they hurt your ranking. Develop keyword strategies that target multiple related keywords so you don’t over-optimize posts.

Slow Page Loads

Load times are one of the factors search engines use to rank websites. Check the load times of your site’s pages using tools such as Google Page Speed Insights or Pingdom Website Speed Test. Don’t forget to check load times on mobile platforms, since most users expect pages to load on their smart phones in less than a second and will often abandon a site that loads in more than four.

One of the best ways to avoid SEO mistakes is to hire a digital marketing agency that knows how to maximize your return on investment. Contact SteerPoint for a free quote.