Top 5 Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

If you’re not ranking #1 for your focus keywords in Google? You might just be making the same mistakes a lot of site owners make. SEO methods are constantly evolving due to search engines developments and users changing perspectives. SEO is one of those strategies that you can implement in a few weeks, but it takes time to master it, so you can compete for high-traffic words and phrases. Here are the 5 most common SEO mistakes I’ve seen, as well as advice on how to correct them:

1. Choosing the Wrong Keywords

Keywords are the main part of SEO. Website ranking mostly depend on choosing right keywords. But are you are choosing the right ones?
One of the most common mistakes in selecting keywords is neglecting the preference of search
engines and users for long-tail keywords. The most important thing to understand what words user are searching in search engines. Before you start the optimization. Using tools like the Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMrush and Moz Keyword Explorer can help immensely in putting your finger on the pulse of trending and adequate keywords.

2:  Faster is Better then Slower

The second thing i’d like to touch on is site speed. The faster your site load, the more Google will favor it. There’s a very useful tool from Google itself to check your site speed, Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse the Chrome extension. These tool gives you an overview of what aspects need improvement to boost the speed of a particular page.

One of the recommendations i frequently give is to optimize your images. A lot of websites have images that are relatively large, which take a lot of time to load. Resizing your images can speed up the loading time. If you have a WordPress site, you can do this easily by installing a plugin that does that for you.

Another tip is to enable browser caching and gzip compression. Both of them will speed up your entire site. The first makes your site faster to load for returning visitors and the latter compresses static files, which makes them faster to load into your browser.

3. Not Using Anchor Text for Internal Links

Have you ever seen links in the body of a web page for “click here,” this post,” and other generic text? From an SEO perspective, it’s a waste. These type of text does not give any link juice. Sure, using a call to action as your link may increase clicks, but it also costs you the opportunity of tailoring your anchor text, one of the most important components of SEO.

For example, if you write a blog post, and you want to link to your SEO Services page, make the anchor text "website seo services" or something similar. Also, if you absolutely must have a call to action, try to at least include some relevant keywords in the link. For example, "click here to learn more about our SEO Services."

4: Neglecting to write awesome content

It’s important to make sure every page of your site has decent content, at least 300 words. You can’t expect Google to see you as an expert on a certain topic when you have only written three sentences about it. This indicates to Google that your page probably isn’t the best result to match the search query.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to think of Google as your audience. You write for your visitors and not for Google. Make sure your visitors are happy after reading your content. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and provide the best answers possible. Therefore, writing quality content for your audience is also something that will immediately lead to Google’s approval.

Writing quality content means writing original content. This is also important to avoid duplicate content with other sites. And it means that sites have to stop stuffing keywords into their texts. Your text has to be easy to read and without grammar mistakes for your visitors. Obviously, your visitors doesn’t benefit from a keyword stuffed text, because this decreases the readability.

5. Skipping Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Title tags and meta descriptions are essential part of SEO that should not be forgotten. Skipping them means a huge missed potential for your content. These optimizing factors are considered by search engines when crawling your website, so if properly done, they can improve the ranking of your content.

Another technical detail that content marketers sometimes forget is including image tags. The alt tags of the visuals you include in your content are important, as they are another sign of how you are targeting articles. Search engine crawlers cannot see the pictures but they can read the alt tags and add this information in the way they index your pages.