THE 5 MOST COMMON SEO MISTAKES

Webmasters go through lots of different steps to try and achieve good SEO for their website, and one of the key factors in any website's SEO is the content. Blogs are great ways of keeping your customers up-to-date with what’s going on in your company, which helps with engagement and in turn helps maintain a good relationship. However, their best use is to help boost your SEO.

Read on for the easy-to-miss mistakes to avoid that almost every blogger or content marketer makes.

Commercialised Page Copy

One of the mistakes that is often overlooked by content writers is that they are so keen on improving their SEO, they start writing their blogs for search engines and not for their readers. A key word or phrase in every single line is going to start to sound commercialised. It’s important to structure your content so that readers are kept engaged and interested, whilst making sure that there’s enough SEO friendly keywords and terms to help with your rankings – but don’t ‘overstuff’ the article – Google isn’t daft!

Make sure the content is checked and checked again. Poor grammar can harm your rankings, so grammar correction tools such as Grammarly can help you make sure everything’s in order.

Internal Links

When people talk about optimising their SEO, internal linking is a subject that’s often overlooked. Internal linking helps your users navigate throughout the website easily and opens up more page crawling opportunities for deep lying URLs. Correctly distributing your internal links on high value pages to others can help distribute authority evenly throughout your site.

Unoptimised Keyword Structure

Keyword research is one of the most important steps you need to take when forming your site's content, as everything that goes into your site should ideally be linked by keywords and phrases that ultimately connect with your main objective.

Remember, filling up your content with just keywords can interrupt your readers experience and may leave the content feeling very commercialised and lacking in feel. Your keyword density being too high can sometimes qualify your content as spam, so keep an eye on this.

Images and Videos

Remember that our number 1 priority is visitor experience so include images. However, concentrating on your text to make sure it’s perfect is all well and good, but that doesn’t mean that your images and videos in your content should go un-addressed. File formats and sizes that are unoptimised are common mistakes that hinder SEO performance.

Image alt text should always be able to rank in a target keyword search. This is where your keyword research again comes into play. Your alt text is also important, as this is what is displayed by Google when the image can’t be shown (this is also used with screen readers, so make it short, descriptive and effective.)

Content Promotion

The simplest, yet most important phase of all is the promotion of your content. You may have slaved away for weeks to get the most perfect piece of content for your site, but if no one sees it, then what’s the point?

Simple steps to promote your content correctly:

• Paid advertisement campaigns on Social Media. These are becoming more and more popular and rightly so; they’re a great way to directly display your content to your target audience.
• Influential person exploitation. Exploiting someone is usually a negative term, however if there are people of influential standing in your business (or even a third-party company) who can share your content then people are more likely to trust their recommendations.
• Content format. Maybe consider creating a video summary or infographic of your content, as they are much easier to share and view.

Good SEO is always going to be a target, whether you’re a greengrocer starting up a new company or a multi-million-dollar business, it’s the first thing on your list.

With competition in the digital world being higher than ever, webmasters are trying new, sometimes complicated methods to try and better their opponents. However, when it comes down to it, the simple (and often forgotten) ways are still the best.

If you’d like to know more, feel free to give us a call on 01502 478000.