Making sure that you are optimizing your online presence for SEO is an essential part of the digital marketing strategy by all digital marketing companies. The content of your website is going to matter a lot when it comes to how it ranks in SEO.
The most challenging thing about SEO is that it is constantly evolving so that the user experience of browsing the internet gets better and better with time. A lot of businesses tend to forget the fact that good SEO practices right now are much different from what they used to be a couple of years ago – or even a year ago at that.
In order to help you avoid making the same mistakes, Slinky Digital have provided a list of the most common SEO mistakes that you should stay away from in 2018.
Keyword Stuffing
Gone are the days when you could fool search engine algorithms by capitalizing on keyword stuffing. A lot of businesses used to insert keywords after every other sentence so that it would boost the SEO ranking for the content and for the website. This strategy is still being applied by many and they need to know that keyword stuffing is a thing of the past.
The focus now is more on relevant content that is natural and easily readable. Keywords are important but without meaningful content, they are going to adversely affect your website’s SEO ranking.
Wrong Keywords
If there is anything worse than keyword stuffing, it is using the wrong keywords. A lot of people make the mistake of using the wrong keywords to optimize their content. There should be a preference to use long tail key phrases rather than just keywords. Instead using the terms you think are correctly defining the products that you have to offer, you have to use the terminology that customers will be using. Search engines are going to emphasize on the conversational aspect of the user search queries rather than specific keywords.
It is best to do your research and find the relevant keywords for the content you’re producing rather diving head first into optimizing your content for SEO without preparation.
Non-Original Content
Okay so maybe this takes the case when it comes to the biggest mistakes that you can make in your SEO practice. The quality of the content you have on your website is one of the most important things but that does not mean you can copy the content from another source and try to publish it as your own. Sure, copying content from other websites was a thing that people did but that was a long time ago.
The simple fact of the matter is that duplicating content just does not work anymore. Instead of trying to rip off other peoples’ content and using some sort of spin-bot to give it another form, it is going to be worth your while investing in original content. This will go a long way in making sure that your website’s SEO rankings go higher and higher.
Final Thoughts
Making sure that you are following good SEO practice is not that hard. All you need to do is follow the current and trending SEO practices while avoiding these common SEO mistakes as you produce the content to publish on your website.