5 Deadly SEO Mistakes
The way search engines rank sites is ever changing. What may have once worked like a charm in terms of SEO may now cost you dearly. Hiding keywords in the page, duplicating content or keyword stuffing have always been frowned upon by search engines but today are banned practices that could cause a dramatic drop in your quality score of even see your site fall into the abyss entirely. SEO is no longer about link exchanges and link directories, now it is a sophisticated art form. Here are the top 5 deadly SEO mistakes that will do more harm than good.
Ignoring URLs
The URL is a crucial part of SEO. The root domain should be as short as possible and be easily remembered by visitors. The URLs on every page of the a site or blog should be search engine friendly and ideally contain the main keyword of the page. For example a page about seo copywriting would ideally have the URL “domain.com/seo-copywriting. A keyword in the URL is far more effective than a keyword in the text in terms of SEO.
Keyword Stuffing Meta Tags
As we saw in the last blog post, meta information is important to onsite SEO, but it needs to be used wisely. Keyword stuffing will get you nowhere, in fact it will turn off potential visitors and annoy the search engines. Make sure the meta tags are optimised but don’t overstuff them.
Spamming Backlinks
Quality is far more effective than quantity when it comes to backlinks. If your site suddenly receives hundreds of low quality backlinks (perhaps from link directories) in a short space of time, your site could be dropped from the rankings. The search engines do not like this practice and will punish you severely for doing it.
Spamming Blogs and Forums
This follows on from the point above. Spamming blogs and forums is very bad practice indeed. It severely annoys other members of the forums and those genuine readers of blogs. Blog and forum commenting is a useful social media marketing strategy however the comments must be relevant and must contribute to the conversation. Any “great post, thanks” comments are just not on, mkay?
Ignoring the Page Title
Time and time again I see websites where the page title has not a single keyword in it. The page title is probably the most important part of onsite SEO. Don’t make the mistake of overstuffing it but adding one or two main keywords is an absolute must. If you ignore this your site hasn’t much of a chance against the competition.
If you would like to receive a free onsite SEO review, contact us here at AshaMoon. We also provide SEO copywriting services and a range of other professional SEO services.
