Thirteen Critical SEO Mistakes That Could Cost You Your Ranking (Part 1)

Millions of consumers search the web everyday to look for information regarding a certain product or service that they need. This is why business owners are investing a great deal of time and money to have a company website that would rank highly on search engine results and hopefully reach out to these potential customers looking for their products or services. However, not all efforts are fruitful, as there are some business owners and online marketing companies that commit SEO mistakes without even knowing it.

There is a sea of competitors in the web that are targeting the same people. Without any definitive strategy, businesses are bound to stay unnoticed, even if they have an outstanding website. One of the best ways businesses can stay one step ahead of the competition is through search engine optimization.

Ask any  SEO company in Arizona and they would tell you just how important SEO is, that optimizing a website is not a luxury anymore but an absolute necessity. Although many website owners know this already, there are people who, in the eagerness to compete with other businesses in their industry, use aggressive online marketing strategies that are actually common SEO mistakes.

Here is a list of these common blunders and how they are going to negatively affect a website’s ranking:

1.    Over-Optimizing Your Website With Keywords – While keyword research and usage is crucial to ranking for search engines, too much can affect your site’s credibility. Also known as “keyword stuffing,” over-optimization is one of the practices that search engines like Google are discouraging business owners to use.

Stuffing your websites with the keywords you want to rank for your website is no longer an acceptable method and could backfire if Google and other search engines find the insertions to be unnatural.

2.    Not Publishing Enough Content – Recent Google algorithm updates all have one thing they favor, and that is unique, high-quality content. Content is surely king, as SEO is practically useless without website content. Search engine spiders crawl webpages and analyze the content. Search engines usually look at a page and mark those with little or without any content as a low quality page, which affects its ranking and makes it less visible to web searchers.

So what can you do instead? Write relevant, informative, and original content. Publish frequent articles that have high quality images, videos, and infographics that encourages higher engagement with readers. Google favors content that people love, and they give it a high ranking. The goal is to be consistent and to write often. Keep an active blog and update the contents of your website.

3.    You are Guilty of Duplicate Content – While content is undoubtedly important for many businesses, duplicate content is one of the grave SEO mistakes that a website owner can commit. Content has always been king, and it still is today. A good Arizona SEO campaign would be paralyzed without outstanding content. Not only does it help boost a site’s ranking, it has a plethora of benefits to businesses, from increasing customers to building the brand name.

Duplicate content should, at any costs, be avoided. An experienced Arizona SEO company would tell you that even the most interesting blog posts mean nothing to search engines if they are copied from another website. Copying content is not only unethical, but also downright illegal. It is, after all, the intellectual property of that particular website. Even if they are royalty-free, any content that has been published in another website is not for you to use. Stick to writing unique, informative content that readers will love and hopefully, share.

4.    Using Unnatural Link Building Techniques – Never, ever buy links. Contrary to what you hear from other business owners, buying links would not boost your ranking in search engine results. Remember that Google, Yahoo!, and Bing consider both the quantity and quality of inbound links, but if you are using unnatural links to help your website, think again. You will get penalized.

Stick to natural guest blogging, participating in forums, or taking advantage of your existing blogs and promoting them through social media. Also make sure you create link-worthy content, something that readers can positively react to and other bloggers can link back to.

5.    You Still Don’t Have a Social Media Account – Some would consider it a crime for businesses to not have social media accounts for their businesses, as consumers go to their social media accounts for information when they are not relying on search engines. Almost everyone has their Facebook account, so if your business is non-existent in Facebook universe, then you are missing out on a big opportunity to connect to potential customers.

Once you have established your presence on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, it would make sense to have these accounts link back to your website. This can be done either by placing your URL in the About section or promoting it through a post. You can even do both just to be sure. Also do not forget to link or promote these social media accounts on your website.

Stay tuned for the continuation of this list of SEO mistakes in the next article. Meanwhile, try to avoid committing these blunders to achieve a high ranking website.