Forbes’ Five Stupidest SEO Mistakes – How Many Are You Making?
No use burying your head in the sand when it comes to SEO.
Forbes has once again published an article on SEO highlighting some of the most common and "stupid" mistakes businesses make while trying to improve their online presence. They have recognised that there is already a lot of guidance available on how to do SEO right but not much on what not to do. Therefore, they have listed five of the most popular SEO mistakes businesses should avoid. Here are the top five mistakes as per Forbes:
Ignoring Analytics: Ignoring analytics is both lazy and foolish. All the information you need to measure your ROI and determine what works and what doesn't is readily available and completely free to access. There's no need to pay for the software or hire a dedicated analyst. So, what's the excuse for neglecting analytics? When you have access to all the data, it makes no sense to use it.
Lame Links: Forbes has recently awarded me with the silver medal. However, I want to emphasise that building low-quality links to get a higher ranking on Google is not a good practice. If a link is not earned through hard work or is not well-deserved, it will not be valuable to Google. It can harm your website's ranking. It's also not a good idea to accumulate thousands of links and hope that some will work. The damage caused by the majority of those links will be so severe that your website won't be able to recover from it. It's frustrating to see that people still make this mistake despite being warned about this issue for years.
Poor Use of Keywords: In the past, many websites around the world employed a technique called "keyword stuffing" to improve their search engine rankings. However, Google has since taken action against this practice, and it has become ineffective. Repeating the same keyword or keywords multiple times in a piece of text can harm your website's visibility and reduce its ranking. Therefore, avoiding keyword stuffing and focusing on creating high-quality content is essential.
Too Little Conversion Focus: What good is all the traffic in the world if nobody buys anything? The answer is, of course, no good at all, which is why another of the biggest mistakes you can make is focusing too much on SEO to attract visitors to the site and forgetting to pay any attention to converting them.
Favouring Filler: Last but not least, Forbes has mentioned that many web admins and SEO professionals still consider old favourite content as pure filler. While it is true that you need a lot of content to get by, it's also important to note that low-quality or crappy content is worse than no content at all. If the content is irrelevant or not worth saying, then your time and effort will go to waste by bothering with it.