Five Common SEO Mistakes To Stay Away From

SEO Mistakes

It's all well and good creating great content and optimizing your website to gain traffic and sales. The problem is, nowadays people put so much emphasis on optimization they tend to overlook common mistakes which can make their S.E.O efforts futile.

SEO Mistakes #1: Not Optimized For The Reader

May 2011 marked a notable change in the way the worlds largest search engine, Google sifted through the Internets masses of content and information. Along with making changes to their spider's algorithm, they also released a set of guidelines for webmasters and content writers to follow. If followed correctly and to the letter, the content in question should then in theory be fully exposed to the widest readership. The problem with this, for webmasters was that where it may have been quite easy to churn out content before, they now have to employ skilled writers and content delivery networks to get achieve the same effect.

SEO Mistakes #2: Packing In Too Many Keywords

Keyword density in an article or web page is essential. A fine balance must be struck in order to gain high ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Whereas in the past, it may have been possible to fool spiders by packing in too many keywords to count, it is now more than ever one of the biggest SEO mistakes and penalized by many search engines.Now the search engines have very cleverly designed processes which can determine the relevance of a body of text to a related term as well as use of good grammar and punctuation to describe it. If Microsoft Word could spell / grammar check 10 years ago think of what Google can do now!

SEO Mistakes #3: Misleading The Reader

Google in particular, but other search engines as well are ever getting better at truth and fact finding, as well as cross referencing facts it knows to be true with authoritative website across the internet. For this reason, it is very important to check what you are saying in your websites content is factual and true. Obviously websites with truly orginal content like fantasy and role-play blogs are exempt from this. SEO mistakes like this are most important to avoid if you are releasing news of content which is already out there and the competition is high. Be proud of what you write or get written, spend time on it and re-read it before publishing it.

SEO Mistakes #4: Not Unique

The more completely original content you are seen to have the better. This is the golden rule for onsite SEO on the web. With only 20-30% of website optimization being possible onsite, it is essential to be unique in both your approach and in your written content. In the May guidelines Google poses the question:

"Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?"

Therefore it is absolutely essential that you do not duplicate text you find on other websites. It is fine to use other pages / sites as inspiration but you must in the extra effort to get good results.

SEO Mistakes #5: Don't Even Look Like Spam

One the the primary goals of Google and indeed many other search engines is to deliver results which contain very high quality and easy to use websites. They are now looking for accessibility so sites can reach a wide audience, page load time and they are looking to avoid showing sites with excessive advertisments and distracting content which is not beneficial to the reader or user.

Avoid Making These Common SEO Mistakes

Print these out and put them somewhere which you will see them when you are writing new content for your site. Once they sink in you can get rid of it, but remember that we are all human and it is often easy to take the easy route or over look something. It is just as important avoiding SEO mistakes