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.

Do you have a business that would benefit from being ranked highly on a local level in the search engines? You will find below three powerful suggestions that you can implement immediately that will help you make your way to the top.

Handling Reviews

This might come as a bit of a shock but negative reviews aren’t really bad. No matter your efforts to make your business perfect, there is always something that can be made better. In fact, if users see only positive reviews about a certain business, they might believe something odd is going on. It may even lead to them looking for a company that is more reliable and trustworthy. This is clear proof that you shouldn’t take bad reviews in the wrong way. You simply have to look at them as being a small part of your company and treat them accordingly. It is the perfect chance for you to make improvements to your services or products to keep your customers happy and it will also improve your reputation.

Optimizing Content

If you want to rank for a certain area, you must make sure to optimize your content and gear it towards the area. This will allow you to catch local users eyes while also attracting the search engines. In other words, if you’re aiming at some area, you should write things related to it and are important to those people. You need to write on topics that they find interesting and are related to them on more than one level. Thinking a little outside the box can prove helpful in this case because your main purpose is to connect with your readers at a local level, which can only be achieved when your content discusses their interests.

Local Number

Additionally, you should make sure to add to your website a local telephone number. Ensure that your number is written out in text form as the search engines won’t be able to understand it then. 800 numbers are out because you should have a real number proving you are a real company.

What’s the reason? They might look good and professional but they don’t show where you are located. Thus, the key is to ensure your phone number is real. When it comes to local SEO, it’s not hard to do; but make sure you learn more about this because it will help you build your business. If you are not yet building your web presence for your business, then we suggest you begin right away.