5 Mistakes in SEO

So you’re getting into SEO to help boost visits to your website, and so far so good. However, there are some pitfalls and common mistakes made by even seasoned SEO professionals, so here's a few to look out for. 

Mistake 1: Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is, quite simply, when you fill your website’s content (or your articles’ content) with too many of your own keywords. For example, let’s say your keyword is “Baltimore Ravens,” and you want people to find your site when they search for that phrase. To try and boost your rankings, you write in that phrase all over your site or article, e.g. “When the Baltimore Ravens play at their home field, Baltimore Ravens Stadium, they make their opponents wish they’d never dared take on the Baltimore Ravens.” Not only does it read like a fifth grader’s homework assignment, but the search engines don’t like it, and will disregard your site because of it.

Instead, aim for perhaps 4-9% keyword frequency, which can still be achieved with naturalistic writing, and is viewed as “relevant” by the search engines instead of “blatantly keyword stuffed.”

Mistake 2: Submissions to Link Farms Disguised as Directories

There is a spectrum of “directories,” with the high and mighty DMOZ on the legitimate end, and lowly link farm on the other. The problem is that almost everything in between lies in a grey area, and it’s often tough to tell how legitimate a directory is.

Before going any further we had better clarify why link farms should be avoided in the first place. The search engines, you see, don’t only judge your site based on its own content, but on the sites that link to it. Sometimes, having link farms link to your site is enough to get it banned from the search engines, which means instant loss of traffic and income.

So what’s a link farm and how do you tell the difference? A link farm exists solely to create back links to other sites, offering no other valuable content or purpose. If this sounds an awful lot like a directory, well, now you know why it’s hard to tell the difference. But here are a few things you can look for: 1) How visually attractive or viewer-friendly is the site? 2) Does it have content other than links? 3) What is its Google Page Rank? Keep these things in mind before submitting your URL to a directory.

Mistake 3: Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is the same text appearing on more than one page on the internet. For example, you write an article with a link or two in it to your webpage, and submit to an article site. Then you turn around and submit it to another article site, and a third, etc. The first copy of your article that the search engines find will be valued normally, but the additional ones will be labeled “duplicate content” by the search engine spiders and will receive little or no value whatsoever for your embedded links.

The answer? Write new articles, of course!

Mistake 4: Overbidding for PPC Advertising

As you’re undoubtedly aware, pay per click advertising (PPC) and SEO are NOT the same thing, but they’re closely related. A big problem amateurs make with PPC is overbidding for the ads, thus spending unnecessary money. Start VERY low (say, five or ten cents per click), and check your results. If you’re not getting any clicks, raise it a little bit, and so on, until you find the range you want, but don’t simply charge in, trumpets blaring, and blow a fortune unnecessarily on PPC advertising.

Mistake 5: Investing Too Much Time in SEO Education

If you’re a serial webmaster, who is 100% in the game to own websites and sell products or services over the internet, then it probably makes sense for you to spend a considerable amount of time and effort on learning SEO practices and skills. However, 95% of business owners probably have better ways to spend their time, such as acquiring new clients, or developing new marketing initiatives. It’s not hard to find an internet marketing company that offers SEO and PPC services at reasonable rates, and which usually proves cost effective. For example, if you regularly earn $40/hour in your business, and it costs $20/hour to hire an SEO/PPC professional, than the decision is a no-brainer: outsource it to someone who 1) knows what they’re doing, and 2) will work for less than you do.

Happy Optimizing!