The main SEO mistakes to avoid!

With the advent of the Internet, competition between companies has gone to another level. There are billions of websites offering the same services/products and serving the same target audience. This competitive online landscape has increased the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) like never before. Today, SEO is an essential ingredient for the success of any business. Increases search engine rankings, targeted traffic flow, and sales for your business. However, many companies, even after implementing SEO, do not reap its benefits. Therefore, practicing SEO is essential, but being aware of common pitfalls to avoid is even more critical. Below are some of the most common SEO mistakes businesses should avoid:

1) Duplicate content:

While content is one of the key elements that drives search engine rankings, it presents a serious threat of penalty if the content found on the website is duplicated. Duplicate content means that the same content is used on different pages of the same website or on different websites. If you have two pages on your website based on one theme and targeting the same keywords, it’s best to consolidate both pages into one. Alternatively, write original content for both pages. The problem with duplicate content is that it confuses search engines as to which pages to index. In addition to original web content, meta tags, meta description, and title tags must also be original. To avoid being penalized and to check if the content you’re posting is unique, pass the content to plagiarism checking tools like Copyscape, Copysentry, and Plagscan, among others.

2) Padding and irrelevance keywords:

As the main job of SEO companies is to rank your business higher on certain keywords, some of them include website-wide keywords and related article sites. More importantly, under the guise of getting high search engine rankings, these companies adopt unethical SEO practices such as targeting keywords with irrelevant content. In an attempt to deceive users and search engines, Google penalizes the website as a spammer, which is a huge blow to their business.

3) Automated Link Building:

Link building services are one of the essential SEO tactics that drive web traffic and increase search engine rankings. However, links created with automated bulk directory submissions, social bookmarking submissions, and article submissions do more harm than good. While there are many sites that offer thousands of submissions at extremely affordable prices, they are not trustworthy as they prefer spam submission to manual submission. Therefore, although manual article and directory submission takes time and more effort, it is more reliable and preferable to automated link building.

4) Over Optimizing Keyword Anchor Text:

While anchor text optimization is vital, over-optimizing it can seriously affect search engine rankings. Using the same keyword anchor text to build backlinks will undermine all your efforts as it would be considered spam by the search engine. SEO companies should embrace variations on anchor text by rotating and mixing keywords to avoid being tagged as spam.

So, if you are already doing SEO for your website but are unable to rank higher in search engines, the above may be some of the SEO mistakes you might be making.