There are a lot of rules to follow in the SEO world in order to appear higher in search engines. These are constantly changing due to algorithm changes, because search engines want to find the most relevant content for the user. With all of this in mind, there are a few things that you could be doing to increase your overall visibility in search engines. Are you guilty of committing one of these seven SEO mistakes?
1. Not Having The Right Keywords
If you write keywords in your page’s meta keywords then they should probably be in the content of that page. Search engines look for this correlation and rank pages according to their relevance with the keywords being searched. You can create a theme and have a keyword in your page title, title tag, meta description, and page content to help increase your visibility, just do not keyword stuff while doing this. You want your keywords to be a direct reflection of the page content.
2. Duplicate Content
Sites that are marked as spam often collect page views by duplicating the same content on multiple pages. Do not fall victim to this! Make sure that every page on your website is unique and not repetitive from other parts of your site. If you need to reference something in one section that relates to another part of your site then link it out. Search engines are known to ban or severely penalize sites that have excessive duplicate content.
3. Not Using Analytics Properly
Not only should you be paying attention to organic and paid traffic, but there are several parts of your analytics that need to be monitored. It is easy to get caught up in focusing on your website traffic, but how many of those are turning into conversions? How long were they on the site? How many pages did they view? These are all things you should be looking at in your analytics.
4. Not Optimizing for Local Search
With people searching more on mobile, it is extremely important to optimize for local search as well as global. Use region-specific keywords in your page titles and meta descriptions to increase local visibility. You also want to make sure that your address and local phone number is on your pages so that you appear in local search results. Lastly, you want to be listed on Yelp, FourSquare, Google Places, and other location based sites and review networks.
5. Not Submitting a Sitemap to Search Engines
The purpose of submitting a sitemap to search engines is so they can crawl every page of your website and index them appropriately. Any time your website pages change, you should be resubmitting a new sitemap in order to clear old pages from search engines. You can also specify the location of your sitemap in your robots.txt file by adding the URL location of your sitemap (sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml).
6. Bad Link Building
It is better to have 10 valuable links built a week from respected sites than 100 links a week from sites that are not relevant to your content. Do not send the same article to submission sites. Sure, this may have worked in previous years to help build authoritative links, but now search engines are looking for thoughtful and unique content marketing. Each site that has given you a link building opportunity has a different audience and requirements that you will need to adjust to. Also, people who follow several sites within the industry and see your same article on multiple sites might think less of you. If these sites offering you link building find out about it, then there goes your opportunity to establish quality links from them.
7. Not Having Unique Title Tags or Meta Descriptions
Not every title tag on your website should be your company name. In fact, that should only be on your home page and you should have unique title for every page on your website. This is not just for SEO purposes, but title tags are usually shared in tweets or used as the text when someone bookmarks that page. If you want to build name recognition, it is all right to put your company name at the end of the title tag if you have space available. The typical length for a title tag is no more than 70 characters or you risk it not appearing in the search engine.