Back to Basics: How to Avoid the Five Most Common SEO Mistakes
A little over a year ago, Google’s video on the top five most common SEO mistakes was greeted with derision by a large number of marketers who dismissed the advice as trite and obvious. In a nutshell, Google’s Head of Spam Search, Matt Cutts, said that the top five mistakes were:
To not have a crawlable website.
To write text using different vocabulary to the words that users enter when making a search.
To pay too much attention to building links, and not enough attention to creating good content.
To not focus enough on strong titles and page titles.
To not use take the time to learn about how Google works, or fully understand the point of SEO, or make the most of webmaster resources.
Reading this you may yourself be dismissing this piece as nothing more than “catchy title, empty content”. But in fact, SEO is much like yoga – sometimes it is good to go right back to basics to take a good hard look at your current (messy?) practices and find out where you can tighten up your technique.
The SEO Commandments for 2014
Keep it simple! Your website must have crawlable content. Even if you have the most original, keyword rich text in the world it is not much good if it isn’t readily accessible to readers and search engine ‘spiders’ alike. Keep your layout logical and smooth flowing – this makes it easier for both people and search engine spiders to read. If you have too much going on and users easily lose sight of where they are in your site, the chances are that spiders are getting confused too, and may even be missing pages, leading to a lower SERP ranking overall.
Aim for high quality, readable, relevant, keyword rich content. You want other websites to link back to your pages as clear and authoritative. The more external links from other relevant websites that your site has, the better your SERP ranking will be . Keep refreshing your content too. Get rid of obsolete pages or information that is just plain out of date and replace it with more topical text. Update your blog at least once a month. Remember Wisdek’s copywriters can help you out here – contact us at [email protected] for more information. And don’t forget to publish content on social media too. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others are becoming increasingly popular ways of searching for information online and search engines are increasingly factoring this into their algorithm.
Optimize page titles and sub-headings so that they accurately reflect page content, rather than the name of the website itself. Use your words wisely, originally, and include keywords where you can since page titles and subtitles affect the SERPs ranking. Think about what a user really wants to know. Think about the words a user will type into the search box. This is the kind of vocabulary you need to include in your page titles and sub-headings.
Write ALL of the links to other pages, photos, videos and other navigation elements within and to your web site in plain old HTML hyperlink language that is search engine friendly. Google and others are still not that great at reading Flash files, Ajax , JavaScript or others. So don’t write captions, subtitles or other headings in these formats and expect them to perform as well, because they may not!
Links that are embedded in drop down menus and forms also often escape the notice of the search engine ‘spiders’ that automatically crawl the pages. Include the drop down menus by all means, but also make sure that there is another link elsewhere on the page that is written as plain old HTML hyperlink text.
Make sure all your links actually connect to real pages that still exist and actually have content. Search engines do not like empty hyperlinks.
Make sure that all your external links are always to highly professional third party sites. Keep them relevant. The more popular, higher ranked and relevant the third party site is, the better this will reflect on your own site.
Frequently monitor your external links! Although you want to encourage external links as a demonstration of your site’s popularity, poor quality, inbound third party links can damage your credibility ratings. Wisdek’s SEO Detox service will clean your site of those harmful links that are holding you down so that you once again rate high in Google SERPs. But you will need to keep monitoring on an ongoing basis to identify any new bad links and get rid of them before they damage your rankings again.
Including photos or other images and tables will improve the look of your site but may do very little to improve its SERP ranking. Be sure to write captions about your visuals which include hyperlinks that refer back to your anchor text. Search engines can only read text, not images, so you need to explain the context of all of your non-text visuals in captions that are keyword rich, written in HTML hyperlink text, so that the information get picked up by the spiders and the artwork “adds” to the SERP ranking. In this way too, even if the images take a long time to load, the user can read the words and have some idea about what content is coming…
Do your homework! Make the most of all those online resources out there – including Google Webmaster Tools. The more you know about how Google goes about crawling and ranking a site, the better able you will be to improve that site’s rankings. To find out more, go to: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/.
I did my research because I know a lot of SEO companies exist and wanted to choose the right one for me. Wisdek's reviews on BBB were good and they explained themselves quite well in my opinion. I approached them for a website design and online marketing program. They took the time to understand everything that I wanted to include in my website and made recommendations even before I signed with them to ensure everything was user friendly and also stayed within Google's guidelines. Next, they treated me with respect and advised us of how long it would take to get ourselves noticed online. All reports are delivered on time and everything is explained to us monthly. Due to their efforts I have been able to gain more clients and people to my website so If you are looking for a company that will simplify the Website and online marketing process to you and show you realistic results at a good price, Wisdek is the way to go.
Anton Snegiroff
CloudedMindsVape.com
We started working with Wisdek in June of 2016. We have approached them with an idea that shortly became our core business. They developed our website within one month. We were very happy with the process and communications. We just opened our store location and Wisdek's technicians helped us set up email, hosting and Google maps. We are very excited to start our search engine optimization campaign and grow our business nationwide.
Peter Anthos
FireitupBBQ.com
My experiences with Wisdek SEO has exceeded my expectations with the impressive scope of the program. Like many business owners, we find it difficult to stay on top of many of the changes and updates on the SEO industry to stay ahead. We have to rely on experts like Wisdek to do all of the research required to keep up to date with the internet visibility needed to support my business. I look forward to the upgrade, and I look forward to a continued partnership with Wisdek.
Peter Anthos
Christopher Fuccillo
Niagaravintagewinetours.com
We've asked Wisdek to develop our new site and we were quite happy how this project turned out. We've got ourselves involved further with Wisdek by expanded into SEO. They've helped us grow our business locally during first three month and thereafter globally. We still work with Wisdek on daily basis.
Christopher Fuccillo
President
Ron Daniel
Planetsoho.com
We've worked with Wisdek right from the beginning to develop and launch our SEO equipped website. We've grown tremendously on account of their SEO and funnel optimization services. Thanks to Wisdek we were able to take our initial steps onto the market in a quick, safe and inexpensive way. We made the decision to jump in with both feet an utilize almost every unique service that they offer and we're glad we did. Today we have over 1 million clients that are getting organized, getting promoted and getting paid using our application.
Ernie Loch
Abacusselfstorage.com
I’ve been with Wisdek for over 2 years now and I am very pleased with their service. What was promised, was delivered. About 3 months after I started I began to enjoy good rankings across Google, Yahoo and Bing. Also, the cost was not unreasonable! Wisdek’s service delivers more leads than posting an add in an old fashioned printed directory and is more affordable than print listings were 5 years ago!
Today I have expanded my services with Wisdek from my beginnings in SEO, to PPC and Content Network Advertising. The return on investment has been incredible. I truly believe Wisdek offers their clients cutting edge marketing services and puts businesses where people are searching. I would like to recommend Wisdek to anyone who needs consistent leads for their business.
Malcolm Macdonald
Northgatechiropractic.ca
Northgate Chiropractic & Massage Therapy Centre in Calgary has used Web based advertising and marketing since 2004. As a result of continual investment and effort, our web site always came up first in local searches. The payoff came 3 years ago when people really began to use search as a way of finding our services. Last fall, our internet traffic slowed considerably and we noted that our search listing had dropped from first on page one to the middle of page four, literally making us disappear.
One of our service providers, Eran Hurvitz of Wisdek, explained to us that Google had changed their rules for search and were imposing a penalty on our web site for having back links. (The very thing they promoted previously as improving our web site standing). This penalty resulted in our listing being dropped to page four. There were thousands of these links and it looked like a significant job to remove these links. Eran offered the services of Wisdek to clean up these links and petition Google to remove this penalty. It was initially estimated to take 3 to 6 months to complete this task. To our great pleasure, Wisdek achieved the penalty removal in just over one month. We are now back on top for our local area and are very pleased with Wisdek’s service.
I would strongly recommend Wisdek and for web based service.
Guidy Mamann
Migrationlaw.com
Wisdek has provided me with a service I need to make my business grow. It has saved me a substantial amount of time by outsourcing and has allowed me to generate more revenue and build more customer relationships.
My clients are international, there is no better way to reach them than online!
Tony & Bruna Cooper
Our Firearm Safety Training business did not exist before we started working with Business Media and Wisdek. Business Media built us a beautiful SEO-Ready website from scratch that is now pulling in leads left right and center. Wisdek applied their most affordable SEO package for local coverage, and it was so effective that we started to rank all across the PROVINCE!
Business is so good that the phones are now ringing daily. We are happy to report that we will be opening a second location as well as a massive firing range in the next few months to capitalize on the overflow. We are actually going to upgrade our campaign with Wisdek to push our business even harder!!
Tony and Bruna Cooper