The 7 Most Common SEO Mistakes You May Want to Avoid

When it comes to content marketing, your blog or website must be optimized for search engines. Although SEO techniques are changing with time, SEO is still important for better ranking. However, while optimizing your site for SEO, be sure to avoid some common mistakes. Below are some common SEO mistakes that most people make.

1. Choosing the wrong keywords

Content optimization comes down to ranking your website for specific keywords. Therefore, it is important that you opt for relevant keywords. You may not want to ignore the importance of long tail keywords.

Before you start, you may want to do your research. For this purpose, you can use some useful tools, such as Moz, SEMrush, Google Trends, and Google AdWords Keyword Planner, just to name a few. Opting for the wrong keywords is a big mistake.

2. Keywords stuffing

Another common mistake is using keywords excessively. Using the same keywords too many times in a piece of content is considered spam by search engines. Thus, it will hurt your search engine rankings.

Ideally, the keyword density should be 0.5-1%. Google can detect excessive use of keywords with a technique called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

3. Create irrelevant content

Another common mistake is producing content that is irrelevant to your content. Search engines, like Google, only serve those pages to online searchers that contain relevant keywords and content. So, if people come to your site but don’t find the content they searched for, your website won’t rank.

4. Posting of non-original content

This point is about the quality of the content you publish on your blog or site. The content that you are going to publish on your blog must be original or your site will be penalized by Google. Therefore, it is not a good idea to copy content from another site and use it on your site.

Duplicate content will not be useful at all. Therefore, it is better that you invest in original content. If you can’t write articles yourself, you can hire a freelancer.

5. Not using title tags and meta descriptions

Meta descriptions and title tags are very important for SEO. Ignoring this aspect of SEO will be bad for your website’s ranking. Another mistake is forgetting to add image tags. The problem is that search engine robots are not programmed to read the text of images. Therefore, you should include alt tags to help search engines know what your images are about.

6. Get low-quality backlinks

Today, content marketers need to understand the importance of getting quality backlinks. However, they make the mistake of getting a lot of low quality backlinks instead of a few quality backlinks from authority websites.

In other words, you need to get backlinks from sites that have a good reputation and rank high.

7. Using too many internal links

Internal links are also important for better ranking. What you need to do is link your blog posts or articles to the top performing pages and vice versa. However, make sure that the articles you are linking to are relevant. Again, you may not want to overdo it or you may be penalized.

In short, make sure you don’t make these mistakes while following SEO techniques.