Article

Rajat Tyagi
Rajat Tyagi 18 April 2017
Categories Search Marketing

Top 5 SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2017

Have you been spending lots of money on your SEO campaigns, but you don’t see the results? There are chances you could be committing some of the dreaded SEO mistakes such as keyword stuffing, using broken links, duplicate content, linking from low quality sources and more.

SEO is paramount for the success of any online business. However, when implementing an SEO strategy, there are many mistakes that many SEO agencies in India are making, but they have no idea it is costing their leads. Read on below to know what they are:

1. Keyword Stuffing

We all encourage the use keywords several times on your content for SEO. However, some people go overboard with keywords, such that the post looks fake, engineered and don’t even make sense. This keyword stuffing is done for manipulation of a site's ranking in Google search.

It’s high time that you understand that intentional repetition of a word or phrase will only hurt your SEO. You may attract Google, but your ranking will go down faster that it rose when Google discovers your strategy. Stick to a keyword density of 3% or less.

2. Broken Links

Sometimes we link to a site in a particular content and forget about it. Some of these links stop working at some point, and because we never review the links, they remain in our content.

People are won over by links that look exciting, and it only works to your disadvantage if they click on a link and it doesn't open.  Links that no longer lead to the intended or expected destination are known as broken links. They will not only hurt your traffic, but your search engine rankings and your website’s domain authority as well.

3. Copied Copy

Websites tend to rip off some other site’s original content and copy-paste on their websites. It is “tedious” for them to create unique content that will compel people to come, stay or return to the site. But stealing from a competitor website is not only plagiarism, but Google also penalizes you for this. It can even push your site so down its ranks that it will be impossible for you to be found on search. In severe cases, your website could be de-indexed. I bet you don’t want to get here.

4. Duplicate Content

Apart from copying from other sites, another mistake that content creators do is duplicate content from within their sites. Two common types of duplication that will hurt your Search Engine Optimization:

(a). Duplicate content in multiple locations

This is notorious in large sites such as e-commerce sites that have many pages which are talking about products that are closely related. This type of duplication provides the following problems to a search engine:

  • Which version of content to retrieve for querying
  • Which version of content to include/exclude from the index
  • Which version of content to direct the link juice to or spread it across all the versions of the duplicate content.

When a search engine faces such dilemmas in ranking, it automatically translates into lower rankings and less traffic to your site.

You can try and work around this problem by-

  • Having a 301 redirect from the lower ranking pages to the ones that rank higher. 
  • Combining pages with similar content into one especially if they’re blog posts.

(b). Title tags and meta descriptions that are not unique

The second kind of duplication is when websites have the same page titles for many or all of their web pages. A title page is one of the most important SEO factors. All your page and post titles should be unique and only a reflection of what the page carries.

5.  Links from Non-Credible Sources

This mostly applies to external linking. Most people think that just linking to any site will be favorable for their SEO strategy, but this is not the case. The links you put to and from your site are akin to votes of confidence.

For a link to be credible, you have to link to experts or someone who is highly relevant to the type of content you are creating.  This also applies to the industry; you don’t get a footballer to go endorsing a restaurant unless in very highly tailored referrals.

Linking from an authoritative blog or website is highly likely to boost the ranking of your site than some low-quality links from unknown or average sites.

Conclusion

SEO mistakes such as keyword stuffing, broken links, writing duplicate and copied content will only hurt your SEO. Avoid these key SEO mistakes in 2017, and you might just see your leads doubling up. Working with a reliable SEO agency will be the best way to help you avoid these mishaps.

You may also check out my post on micro influencer marketing.

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