If you have a website, or maybe you’re running some other kind of business on the web, you’re going to want traffic that’s actually searching for what you’re offering. To go about this, you must get your site ranked high in the search engines. When you have SEO done on your website, you start to get free organic traffic that’s not only highly targeted but also converts well. However, if you are new to the whole SEO concept, then you might make mistakes that will harm your site on the long run.
Your main goal should be to get the search engines to approve of your site, not ban it completely. This is why it’s crucial that you stay away from the following mistakes if you hope to reach your goals. In this article, we’ll be discussing about various search engine mistakes that you should avoid if you want to get quality visitors hitting your site.
Spamming
Webmasters just starting out often make the SEO mistake of inputting far too many keywords into their text that aren’t specific. Yes, keywords happen to be an important element of SEO, but if you go on and stuff a high number of keywords in your content, then it will only get you into trouble with the search engines as they will penalize your website for spamming. You’ll lose your ranking due to the over abundance of the keywords on your site, which means you’ll lose the traffic too. Your traffic will become displeased as they’re more interested in information they can read and that offers something they can use.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the most overlooked SEO strategies most people. Your internal linking structure is one more of the few SEO factors that you completely control. Linking strategy is a gem that is not even employed by most and you can reap the rewards of having higher page rankings. Instead of focusing on sending your visitors away you should concentrate on linking all of your related pages together in a logical fashion. But when you put everything in place, you’ll see great results. And these results last for a long time. If you go to Wikipedia and search for something of interest, you will notice that they have links to many other related topics that are on their site, that is a prime example of internal linking.
Poor Content
When adding content to your site you must please both the readers and the search engine. Another basic SEO strategy is to present the search engines with content that answers the questions of what a searcher is looking for and to format it in a predetermined way. Having bad content on your site is a sure shot recipe towards failure when it comes to SEO. Your articles and posts should be no less than 300 words and have a keyword density of 3%-5%. The page title should match the keywords of the specific content. Avoid any form of keyword stuffing in your content as it can harm your ranking.
Above all, it’s important to stay away from excessive flash, but if you include images make sure you’re using ALT tags. Avoiding the above mistakes will most definitely help your rankings and keep you safe from getting banned.