10 SEO Blunders Business Owners make on their Websites

Search Engine Optimization or SEO can be rather tricky for new and old business owners alike. It is a challenge which when left unattended might hamper your website growth and rankings. With Google having changed how its search algorithms function recently, it is more likely to favor a mobile friendly website in its ranking driven by user behavior. Prevent your SEO strategy from going wrong by focusing on omitting these common SEO blunders most business owners tend to commit

10. Irrelevant Anchor text links

The clickable hyperlink text on a web page is known as Anchor text. It serves as food for search engine crawler and is hence a coveted skill if the links are phrased cleverly.

It is best to avoid wasting opportunities by attempting to build a link with text like ‘click here’. While it can be incredibly tedious to understand and build anchor text links that include important keywords for better ranking, it is even more important that the anchor text is tailored to avoid suspicion from Google.

 

9. Links from non-credible sources

Just to have links to and from your sites is not enough. It is important to focus more on quality of building links than simply increasing the quantity. A backlink from an authoritative blog may be a milestone for your ranking and traffic, giving it a major boost. On the contrary, a hundred or even more links from directories might be easy to score but these low quality sources play little or no role on your rankings, if not negative. It is hence best to focus on building links for your website from sources that have a positive image in the similar niche or industry thus helping you land better rankings for your website.

 

8. Avoiding Analytics

Another blunder most people perform is to entirely neglect the website’s performance data. To not focus on analytics is as close as not focusing on business objectives. Wouldn’t it create a better business when you know which parts of the content perform better and what part of the website is left ignored in order for you to improvise on it? Moreover, you’d recognize instantly on which keywords tend to invite better traffic to your website.

 

7. Meta Keyword Tags

Using Meta Keywords can in simple words mean that you’ve failed the SEO challenge posed for your business. While initially, search engine algorithms did consider meta keywords as a parameter for rankings, the day is long gone. The meta keywords are found in the header element in the website’s HTML code and can hence publicize your digital marketing strategy for competitors to duplicate and gain business from it by through pay per click campaigns.

 

6. Non Unique title tags and meta descriptions

For most business that create or sell similar type of products, this blunder is often a repeated offender. You must hence focus that the page titles and meta descriptions are unique to each of the web pages and duplication is avoided at all costs. This should specially be considered in certain Content Management Systems which auto-generate page titles. Unique title tags and meta descriptions can help the search engine crawler index the link correctly and also makes more sense for the reader to perceive your content to be relevant.

 

5. Not Optimizing with the right keywords

Once the blog is built, the content should have words which suit the purpose of your business and give information about the products you sell. However, it is even more important to have certain keywords in the content that trace to what people tend to type into search boxes on search engines. It is in your best interest to use tools like Wordtracker Keyword Tool to ensure that the words you are using are actually keywords that are searched for or you simply pick and use words that make good keywords.

You wouldn’t believe how many businesses try and gain rankings by using unrelated keywords. However, this attempt will only hamper your traffic from growing in the long run. It s important thus to focus on being specific to your business and still conforming to vocabulary that your audience is likely to use.

 

4. Broken Links

Do you ever like clicking on the link and ending up on a page where the desired data no longer exists? That is exactly the story with broken links where hyperlinks cease to point to the intended web page. While it may be natural if the website you’re pointing to has migrated or gone out of function, it is important to keep a check for broken links. Not only will bad links gain you a bad reputation but will also pull you down on Google rankings.

 

3. Not friendly with Mobile Users

With over 40% of the web users using mobile phones to browse websites, it is important that businesses focus equally much on a SEO and website structure focusing on the mobile traffic. It can be a turning point for your marketing strategy. Google too has released a mobile specific algorithm to held track and monitor the performance of certain websites. It is hence essential for businesses too to think as much for mobile users as for desktop ones.

 

2. Copied Copy

An absolute blunder to commit both in terms of SEO and Business ethics is to copy content from another website. Most often, it might at first seem an obvious option, but duplicating content from another website may lead Google to push your website way down in the rankings. Perhaps so low that no-one would land up on your website through search engines. Moreover, you might as well be risking to get Google to de-Index your website.

The perks of copying content can never be worth losing your website. Can they?

 

1. One Keyword Stuffing

To have good keyword density is a plus, but to have content overloaded with the same keyword can be a horrendous mistake to make. You wouldn’t like landing on a page, which keeps on repeating expressions and make of the content what seems like a bad content copy.

 

You need not be a bad writer to make a bad copy, you might simply have attempted to fit in a lot of keywords or the same keyword a lot of times. What you must know though is, that instead of attracting better rankings, you might end up attracting Google with the consequence of getting kicked down the result pages.