Everyone makes mistakes it’s the way life works, SEO is a complicated topic there is a lot to remember and then you might need to put what you remember into practice. While you may be thinking that it is new SEO’S with little experience who are making the mistakes, well you are wrong even experienced professionals are making the same mistakes. Below you will see the common mistakes made by SEO’S that will make you miss out on vital traffic.

Making all your links come through your homepage

This is what a lot of SEO’S do, a lot of people think that it is great if all your links go through to your homepage because that is the focal point of anyone’s sales funnel. This is not only a bad mistake it’s a bad strategy which is likely to do more harm than good. The reason for this is that many sites have too many homepage links. If most sites are doing this then you shouldn’t be, the trick in SEO is not to follow the crowd and you should try and be innovative because if you follow the crowd you will be no where near the top of search results. An example of a good strategy would be to create links to all the other pages on your site because there is no point in creating them and not utilizing them in a good strategic way.

Spreading links across your site makes sense, you want people to see different parts of your site, instead of people just going directly to your home page and looking for what they need, it is beneficial to people if they can be directed to a relevant page on your website. By doing this it will build trust if what you provide is at a good standard. This will help your visibility on search results because the more high value pages you have the more opportunity you have to be seen.

Once on the first page stop link building

Search engine optimization is always changing. While it is a success to be on the first page of search results, you shouldn’t just stop there and give up on SEO because that is another bad mistake. With regular changes in SEO it is your job to keep up with it and work on a strategy that will keep you on the first page and maybe even higher. Try to think about it from Google’s point of view, your site wasn’t doing anything meaningful and suddenly there was a lot of activity happening around your site and then it dies off. Google will think that you had a good campaign for your website and that you have nothing left to provide. The knock on affect of this is that your positions would start to decrease on search results and you will loose traffic and clients very quickly, you will need to keep interesting Google with new and exciting ideas if you want to stay on the first page.

Not involving blogging in your strategy

A big mistake a lot of SEO’S do is undervalue blog posts, not blogging is a very bad mistake and it can actually be one of the highest value strategies you can use. Just think, how often can you update your main page e.g. about us, services etc, it isn’t often you can because there is nothing more you can say apart from what you already have on your site. It will mean your site is hardly having any activity on it and Google doesn’t like inactive sites. If you have a blog then you are adding another page to your site at least once a month or even once a week. This will show Google that you are working hard and will improve the ranking of your site. Having a blog page updated at least twice a month is better than not at all it will generate traffic you will not of had before.

Ignoring content relevance

Some marketers have the mentality that people are dumb or that search engines are dumb. This is naivety because people aren’t stupid they want to be won over by a product and have it sold to them in a unique way. A thing that makes people smart is that with whatever product they are looking for they want trust, they want to know what they are spending their money on is worth them putting in the effort to do so and that they are spending their money with someone worthwhile. It means that if the content you create is not relevant then people will see right through what you are showing and there will be no trust so you will have a lot of bounce rates.

In the way people want trust, search engines also want trust, it’s what people at Google are searching for because as stated above it is what people want.

If you think search engines are dumb then you should give up on SEO because it couldn’t be further from the truth. Creating SEO content for the sake of it isn’t good enough anymore and you need to make the things you are showing are relevant.

Not using brand anchor text

This is one of the things that will remain a constant in SEO for the long run. The problem isn’t the anchor text it’s the type of anchor text that you use. It’s no secret that the more diverse your anchor text is the more natural Google will see it. The one anchor text that SEO experts seem to overlook is branded anchor text, the things that are on it should include, your brand name, your URL and your name. If you then link that to your homepage then you have created a branded anchor text link. The thing you should do with this is if it is more relevant to another page on your site then you should link it to that page instead of the homepage. A lot of SEO’S would write some content and not leave a link to their website which is a very bad thing to do, this is a perfect opportunity to boost your search ranking results. When your name, brand or URL comes up naturally in content you should definitely link it.

Don’t worry you won’t be penalized for doing this it gives you a much better chance of better search ranking.

Summary

Just to summarize it is important if you want to be successful in SEO that you shouldn’t cut corners because you will get nowhere and that you take into consideration all of the points in this blog.