Posted on February 7, 2020
Search Engine Optimization is an extremely complicated field. While SEO is an effective way of gaining website traffic and reaching a wider audience, it can also ruin your site when done incorrectly. SEO practices are constantly evolving due to search engine developments. Some practices that are proven effective before, can give the opposite effect today. We that in mind, we gather here the top 9 Major SEO mistakes that could be fatal to your site. Avoid these SEO errors so you’ll get your desired results.
1. Not ready for mobile friendly
Google and other search engines can now detect if your site is mobile-friendly or not. In 2015, Google updated its algorithm and rewards websites that are optimized for mobile devices. The mobile-friendly site has more chances of getting a position on the first page of Google search results than those that don’t.
In addition to this, a mobile-friendly website has more chances of reaching potential customers. It is because mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet are now part of people’s lives. If you want to reach those customers, make your site mobile-friendly. This point is the most important Major SEO mistake that you have to avoid.
2. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword Stuffing is a Black Hat SEO technique that was reliable and popular before the 2000s. Here, the writer or the website owner tries to manipulate the search result by loading the blog or the page with tons of repeating keywords or keyword phrases.
Keyword Stuffing was proven to be working before Google made an algorithm update. Nowadays, doing keyword stuffing on a page can be deadly to your site. It can result to bad user experience because of the unnatural flow of the content. Worse is that your site can get penalized by Panda Google Algorithm for low-quality content. Your traffic and ranking will surely sink once you commit this SEO error.
3. Prioritizing Search Engine over the user
This practice is a common failure to beginner SEO writers. They put in mind the content length, keyword density, using keyword variations, and adding local modifiers to please the search engine. The problem comes when the writers forgot who their writing for and focus on those elements.
Google rewards pages with natural and unique content. Prioritizing Search Engines over the user will result in unnatural and unhealthy content. Believe it, Google is so advance no that it can identify high-quality content.
4. Using Generic Anchor Text
Anchor text is a clickable text in a hyperlink. It is important in SEO because it gives clues about what your content is about. It also helps the search engine to identify that your content is relevant to the page you are linking may it be inbound or outbound.
There are different types of Anchor Text. In SEO, you must avoid Generic Anchor Text as much as possible. Examples of Generic anchor text are “click here,” “this post,” “This,” and many more.
Generic Anchor text may help increase links. However, from an SEO perspective, it is important to always modify your anchor text and make it related to your topic. Inserting some keyword on the anchor text is also a recommended practice.
5. Using the same anchor text
Yes, optimizing and adding keyword is important in building anchor text. But making anchor text similar for every link on a page is an SEO major mistake.
If a search engine found exactly the same anchor text, this may look suspicious. It can also be a sign that the links weren’t acquired naturally. Here, you can get a Google Penguin penalty.
Our advice is to make variations on your anchor text.
6. Focusing on Link quantity
Backlinks and internal links can help you rank up in google and other search engines. This is because these links signal the search engine that your content is relevant.
There are many ways of getting a volume of links from different websites. But do not overdo it. In fact, you should be critical in building links from another site. There are some SEO companies today that sell bad backlinks. When you have too many of this kind of link, you can get penalize and lose your ranking.
Nowadays, there are many tools that allow you to check the strength of the domain. Take advantage of those SEO tools to analyze their authority and incoming links. It is also advisable to focus only on getting links that are relevant to your page.
7. Picking competitive keyword
In keyword research, it is a good idea to use keywords with a high volume of search. However, you should also pay attention with the keyword competition
The idea is that the higher the keyword difficulty means the harder it is to rank on the search engine result page. You can identify these metrics by using some keyword research tools. In keyword research, it is always best to use specific or long-tail keywords because it can lead you to quicker rankings. Additionally, people who used specific keywords in the search queries are the visitor who really wanted to use your website service.
8. Errors with the robots.txt file
It is a requirement for a website to have a robot.txt file. It is used to instruct the search engine robot how to crawl your site. It is also used to guide the search engine robot to identify which pages they can index, and which are not.
Creating a robot.txt file is an easy task. You can do this using a notepad application and upload it to the root directory of your website. However, you should always be careful in making the file. It is a sensitive file. Make sure that exactly you used “robots.txt” as the name of the file.
More importantly, be careful with the command you enter. In robot.txt file, there are two important commands you should take in mind: the disallow command, which tells a user agent to not crawl a specific URL; and allow command, which allows the bot to access your page. Make sure not to accidentally block the search engine bot to crawl the entire site.
9. Not checking your competitor
There is no shame in spying your competitor. In fact, it is one effective SEO practice to analyze your competitor’s link building strategy, keyword usage, and even blog topics. You can use the data you have gathered to outrank them in the search engine result page.
However, when we say, you should spy your competitor, we don’t mean to copy their work or blog. Avoid plagiarism. It is illegal and Bad in SEO. You must create your original content that is better than your competitor, not copying their work.
All of them are the top 9 Major SEO mistakes, We hope that you are aware of that and can improve your SEO.
