For many business owners, SEO is one of those marketing buzzwords that you know is important for your company’s website, but you don’t quite understand how. You may be spending hours every month trying to optimize your site with content and widgets, and we as marketers applaud your efforts!
The next time you’re reviewing your SEO practices, do yourself a favor and make sure you’re not making any of these common mistakes:
Mistake #1: Keyword-Stuffing
Keywords are important, but there is such a thing as overdoing it.
Stuffing your website and content with keywords not only will make your content look worse, but they also have a negative effect on how your website ranks.
What are commonly referred to as “Google Bots” are reading every word of your website content and assessing it before placing your page on their search pages. These bots can determine whether a blog post or web page is useful and valid information, or if it’s simply a series of words with keywords sprinkled throughout.
Moderate the number of times you use your keywords on your website and most important of all, don’t use them at the expense of the quality of your content.
Mistake #2: Ignoring Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
While there’s also such a thing as keyword stuffing, there’s also the possibility that you might not just be using enough keywords.
For a truly successful SEO campaign to be, well, successful, you’ll need to put in a lot of work. This includes making sure that each page on your website has the right keywords on its body, as well as its meta description and title tag; both play a key role in determining whether people are going to click on your website or not.
In case you didn’t know, the title tag is the actual title of your website’s page that shows up on google, while the meta description is that short paragraph found underneath it.
Other than your actual audience, Google also checks your title tag and meta descriptions for keywords so they know what the rest of your content is all about. Then, if it’s properly optimized, Google will put your content in front of what its algorithm has determined as the right audience.
So yes, meta descriptions and title tags are pretty important.
Mistake #3: A Slow, Unresponsive Website
You can have all the best content in the world and Google won’t like it one bit if the page it’s being served on is slow and unresponsive.
Most people tend to underestimate just how much load times can affect their domain authority. But think about it; you wouldn’t stay long in a restaurant if the service is slow. So, how do you expect people to stay on your website if it takes a long time for the pages to load?
Try to determine the speed of your website via services such as GTmetrix and see if it’s slower or faster than average. If it’s the former, then you might want to contact your website’s host ASAP to find a solution.
Mistake #4: Leaving Stale Content
Again, Google Bots are skimming websites constantly and sites that post new content often are going to rank higher than those that haven’t made an update in months.
Don’t sacrifice quality for length, though, because bad content is just as harmful to your website as no new content at all.
Effective SEO Is Not Easy, But It’s Not Impossible
SEO can be a nightmare to manage at times, but it’s worth it. Build yourself a schedule (Download our FREE downloadable marketing calendar here) to keep your content creation on track, post it regularly, and your ranking will undoubtedly improve.
