COMMON SEO MISTAKES TO AVOID

In this chapter, We discuss the prevention steps to overcome the mistakes which are commonly encountered in the Search Engine Optimizer(SEO). After the years of journey in SEO, We have seen thousands of websites and audited hundreds of them. After a while, one starts to notice trends. The same basic SEO errors are repeated over and over. Most of these are easy to find and resolved.

INTRODUCTION

If you have a site and don’t have an SEO consultant, these are a few of the things you can quickly go and check yourself. If you do have an SEO consultant, they should have brought these issues to your attention. Common mistakes are as follows:

1.Duplicate content:

Duplicate content in the context of SEO, means the same content appearing in more than one webpage (URL) within the same or different domain (web site). The most common problem with duplicate content is that search engines can’t decide which content to index, eventually not showing this web page in search results.

2.Duplicate URL :

The few duplicate URLs, where the upper case or lower case URL text are used inconsistently, causing search bots to be confused and consequently devaluing the URL or not ranking your website highly.

The issue here is if you have all your internal or external links pointing at www.example.com/Samsung-Max or www.example.com/samsung-max and the “real” version of the page is www.example.com/samsung-max, you’re splitting the link equity between these two URLs.

How do you resolve these duplication issues?

Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a restaurant site with separate pages for two locations, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both locations. You could also separate it into two pages and write unique content about each location.

3.Poor site structure:

While building a new website, the web developer doesn’t integrate best SEO practices with the website structure. This is totally understandable because the web developer is not an SEO specialist. Therefore an overlooked site architecture (in other words, the way the website is laid out and how the pages are interconnected to each other) is fairly common.

I would argue it’s the single most underrated area of SEO.

In general, the homepage of your site is going to have the most authority because it’s going to have the most incoming links and the best quality of inbound links and it’s a landing page. Authority (or link juice) flows throughout a website from high authority pages to low authority pages through links. For every step far away a web page is from the home page, the less and less of that total authority is going to be passed to it which leads the worse rank for the homepage.

Ultimately you want to create your website structure so it is easy and intuitive to navigate for users so that the search engine can easily index and assign a good ranking.

4. Don’t have a mobile site design for multiple screens:

Google is now taking into consideration the mobile when ranking websites. Here are some other facts to keep in mind about the importance of a mobile site

72% of customers who visit a mobile unfriendly site are likely to jump to a competitor’s website.

According to a recent Datareportal, there are 5.11 billion unique mobile users in the world. Most of the traffic coming from mobile devices from websites that are managed is now at an average of 35% and it is still going upwards.

With that much focus on usability, the demise of the desktop browser dominance, and the prevalence of mobile devices, Google’s made it very clear that “no mobile experience, no love from Google…!”

Hence, creating a user-friendly site design that works well and fast across all devices…especially mobile and tablet. Mobile versions for your website can be built easily by using one of two popular websites designing platforms such as Wix and WordPress which allows the designer to create the website user-friendly to the mobile environment and responsive pages.

In fact, this website designing application (Wix, WordPress) provides the in-built facility of SEO friendly websites.

CONCLUSION

Well..! I’ve explained the most common mistakes that people have when it comes to SEO, there are many SEO mistakes that you should look out too, but you should look at SEO from a high-level, strategic point of view to make sure that your SEO campaign is heading towards the right direction.

My recommended SEO approach here is:

1. Fully indexed pages

2. Use alt tag for images

3. Use an SEO browser

4. Simple website architecture

5. Unique content

6. Use canonical tag

7. URL structure

8. Awesome UI

9. Mobile-first design

The above-mentioned approaches develop awesome content and generate high quality, thematic links to your site.

I hope it covers everything about SEO…! Pretty much I believe.

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Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid