Ask any SEO expert about a certain issue for your website, and we can guarantee that you’ll get a few different answers. That’s the beauty of it. SEO is an extremely complex and often indecipherable art that is constantly evolving, so pinpointing exactly what to do and how to do it is extremely difficult.
In the end though, there are many things that us SEO experts agree on that are absolutely necessary to the success of a website when it comes to search engines. In every business there are always going to be people that are still making common mistakes, so this post will be about SEO mistakes that you need to stop making immediately, or else you will no doubt suffer the consequences. Avoid them like the plague!
Forgetting the Title Tag
So your site is beautifully crafted, and the keywords are lightly sprinkled throughout the pages to lure your customers in. Is there something that you’re forgetting? THE TITLE TAG MAYBE? We can’t tell you how many times we see webmasters forgetting this hugely important piece of SEO.
The title is prime beachfront real estate. It’s the 50 character snippet that tells your reader and the search engine what your website is all about on the SERP. If you just display the home page or use something like mywebsite.com as your title, this is sinful, downright sinful. Make sure you use this space wisely, because without it you won’t be able to tell people what you’re all about on the results page.
Not Having Clean Urls
Whenever we see this, we get a bad feeling in our stomach. We can’t tell you how bad it looks for both the website and the search engine when we see a URL that looks like more like a comic book fight scene speech bubble than an SEO-optimized address. A lot of people will forget to make sure the URL looks nice, and have it look like yourdomain.com/!1%44;0983 instead of yourdomain.com/home. Having a clean URL with a keyword in the title quickly allows both the reader and the search engine to immediately identify what they are looking at. It might not be a make-or-break SEO strategy, but the URL is still an important aspect of your website’s success.
Duplicating Content
If there is anything that recent Google updates have shown, it’s that they are not going to stand websites that have duplicated content. Now this doesn’t mean that you can’t get ideas from other places on the internet, but it does mean that what you do have should be in your own words, and well-written. Interesting, original content is the biggest key to success, and the days of just copy pasting stuff are long gone. We don’t think that most websites have any malicious intent – we just don’t think they realize that having someone else’s content is a bad thing. However, we still see some websites trying this just to get visitors and make a quick buck. More is not always better, so make sure to focus on quality over quantity, and avoid duplicating content from other places on the web.
Like we said before, SEO is a delicate mix of both art and science, so it is important not to get caught up in what is or is not exactly correct. The rules of SEO are like the rules of life: flexible. There are multiple pathways to success and sometimes doing something quirky, different, or downright crazy can lead to success and new avenues that nobody knew existed. When it comes down to it though, there are still a few things that we know to be right or wrong. Avoid these common mistakes and watch your website flourish.
For help with improving your SEO, trust the experts. The BlueHat Marketing team is here for you.
