Avoid These 15 SEO Mistakes, If You Want To Stay In Competition

The biggest mistake web masters make, while optimizing their sites for high search ranking, is relying on Black Hat SEO techniques and having unrealistic expectations. It is learnt that they do so in the rush to achieve high rank. Competition in the web has increased and web masters often make such silly mistakes in order to get an edge over others.

Here we’ve summed up 15 fatal mistakes that webmasters could make while searching SEO partner or taking SEO advice. Also, the webmasters often put blind faith in the SEO services without monitoring the performance of their SEO advisors.

Here we go…..

1. Collaborating with an Unreliable and Dishonest SEO Company

Is your SEO offering service at an unbelievable price or he’s making unrealistic claims like getting your site on first page within a week? If yes, then the SEO company or the guy, in case you’re working with a freelancer, might not be reliable. He could use Black Hat SEO techniques to rank your site and it will harm the site in the long run.

2. Ignoring Recommendations from an SEO Company or Professional

Many website companies have in-house SEO teams but they also hire experienced SEO for guidance and advice. Often the advice of SEO consultant could be conflicting with the advice of in-house SEO team. Which advice will you follow and why? Ideally, you should follow the advice of your consultant as he’s more learned and experienced than your in-house SEO.

3. Expecting Immediate Results Is Unrealistic

Expecting results isn’t unrealistic as SEO has to improve search rank of your site but expecting it quick is unrealistic. It’s simply not possible to achieve high search rank without investing time and money. But you should keep monitoring the results to make sure that the SEO work done on the site is giving positive results.

4. Not Tracking Your ROI/Analytics Data

Always keep track of your promotional acts. For instance, you publish an informative article on your website but don’t monitor how many likes or comments that article got. It is a mistake as you don’t keep track of the SEO work you’re doing on your site. Similarly, you need keeping track of social media posts. Here Google Analytics could help.

5. Not Protecting Your Staging Environments

Do you understand Staging Environment? It is the testing phase before production. And there are many ways to protect the Stating Environment. First is to include robots.txt file to prevent search engine bots from crawling your site and second is to have no index tag in the robots.txt. Yet another way is to set a password with an .ht access login and also you have your IP address restricted by editing the .ht access file.

6. Missing Href lang Tags

Missing href lang tag is missing traffic as Google determines country and language of sites from this tag. Google will show your site in the local lingo of the visitors with the help this tag. If you miss this tag, you will miss all the action.

7. Not Having an HTTPS Based Site

Understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. The HTTPS stands for security; it is a symbol of reliability. Your customers would desist from doing any financial transaction on your site if it isn’t HTTPS based. Google values HTTPS based sites as these sites have multilayer protection – encryption, data integrity and authentication.

8. Ignoring Social Elements

Social media can help your site reach at top level of search engine ranking and increase your customers. Presence in social media is helpful in building credibility and reputation. But ignoring the social media could impact your website adversely. What you need doing to connect your website content to social media is to integrate the site with social media platforms and place icons for quick connection to different media channels.

9. Neglecting Website Makeover & Website Maintenance

How much do you care about your website? It if has errors; broken links and poorly written pages could create bad user experience. It shows that you’re little bothered about presentation and the audiences. Poor maintenance will reduce your reliability and traffic in the long run.

10. Not Using Canonical Tags

Use canonical tags to prevent duplicate content from plaguing your site. Also make sure that the tag is properly placed otherwise you won’t get any benefit of the tag.

11. Not Registering Your Site with Webmaster Tools

Have you registered your site with Webmaster Tool? Google and Bing have these tools for websites and the tools provide information about sites registered with them. And you don’t need paying for these tools but you will pay dearly for not using the tools.

12. Focus Only on Google

How do you know that your customers are searching information on your site only on Google? It is true that it is the largest search engine but there are others as well. For instance, a customer might use Google on desktop and Bing on mobile.

13. Chasing PageRank Is Obsolete

Google no longer assigns ranks to pages. It removed Page Rank tool from its Toolbar in August 15, 2016. Read Google guidelines for SEO to do better in other areas.

14. Neglecting Search Engine Guidelines

Google is continuously working to improve its search patterns and results. It releases guidelines like it released Panda and Penguin for SEOs. It is important that you pay heed to what search engines say.

15. Not Including a Blog in Your Website

It isn’t a mistake but lack of knowledge. Having a blog on your site will not only improve its value but also help you communicate with your visitors. Also you can promote your brand through your blog.

Conclusion

Mistakes can happen anytime and to anyone but you should be able to notice the mistakes and take corrective measures on time. Internet marketing is expanding and evolving; new ideas are presented every day and also new ways for marketing are formed. If you aren’t aware of the latest in digital marketing then you might lag behind your competitors. At the end of the day, you can learn from mistakes.