Are you currently trying to figure out why your site isn’t ranking so high in the major search engines, despite doing, at least, everything you believe to be right?
Well, the reality is, knowing just the basics isn’t enough to get the most out of many of the major search engines nowadays. As a webmaster, there are a tons of things you could be slacking on, that could be pulling your content down. This is typically the case for both large and small company websites.
While, you can find a ton of online resources that will teach you about both the on-page and off-page SEO practices, there are those common mistakes that you don’t want to overlook.
It’s not just loading speed that you want to focus on.
In this article, we’ll go through several of the most common SEO mistakes that could be holding you back. Additionally, we’ll give you some pointers that you should be able to use, to overcome them.
- Using Plagiarized Content
A lot of new website owners tend to make the mistake of publishing content that already exists on the internet. This is something you want to stay clear of, as the search engines can easily detect plagiarized content, and will penalise your website, as a result. For this reason, you only want to publish unique and original content on your site, as this is what the search engines prioritizes.
Additionally, you may also want to provide sources to the content that you used to craft the article. Just stay clear of repurposing already existing content. You can use a plagiarise checker to verify that your content is original, before publishing it.
Copyscape is one of the most notable plagiarise checkers out there, so you may want to try that. It will tell you whether or not a duplicate of your content exist somewhere else on the internet. Doing all of this will ensure your website is looked upon favourably in the internet.
- Weak Keyword Research
One mistake many website owners make is to not do any keyword research for their site. If you don’t have any understanding of what your main audience is looking for, then it will be difficult for visitors to find your site.
If you want to get the most out of your content, then you must carry out keyword research beforehand.
There are generic keyword search terms that you may be tempted to target, primarily before of their large search volume. But the truth is, these terms can take a considerable length of time to rank for. Focussing on more targeted long-tail terms, will yield the best results, and will ensure you don’t have to wait years, before you start to see conversions.
For example, “vehicles” has a very high search volume, but it doesn’t point to anything specific. On your website, you’d want to use a proper keyword, like “Cheap 4WD Ford Vehicles” or “Best off-road Vehicles”. As these are long-tail keywords that people are searching on.
- Not Optimizing Your Page Titles
When you take the time to optimise your page titles it can help those pages rank better in the search engines. If you want search engine traffic, then you must include your target keyword in the title of the page you’ve optimised it for.
Every page on your site will have its own unique content, which means you should have unique titles for each one, targeting different keywords, ideally. If you fail to properly title your content, it could result in your content not showing up in the search engines at all.
- Not Optimizing Site Speed
When looking at SEO, the speed of your site is a major factor for you to think about, as a slow site is really a dead site. All major search engines prioritize websites that load fast, as they are looking to provide the visitor with the best possible experience.
If you want your site to load fast, there are several things you need to do to optimise your site. This may include using minifying CSS, compressing your images. There’s also content delivery networks (CDN), which are designed to serve your site, making your images and other media files load considerable faster.
You don’t want your pages to take any longer than 2 seconds to load, so make sure you have a heads up on how fast your site is, and are taking steps to ensure it is within the acceptable range. Doing this will ensure your site ranks as high as it possibly can.
- Low Quality Affiliate Content
This one is self-explanatory, but if you have poor quality content on your site, then it doesn’t deserve to rank.
One thing many affiliate sites tend to do is build sites around long-tail keywords that are easiest to rank for. Which, on the surface is a good thing. However, a lot of these webmasters fail to rank for any of the keywords they target, and this is because of the little effort they put into constructing truly engaging content.
- Neglecting Your Meta Tags
Meta tags are very helpful for your search engine efforts. When done right, they can be used to improve your sites click-through rate in the search engine results page. When you include the right phrases and keywords in your Meta descriptions it can make your page appear much more prominently for the search term it’s targeting.
If you don’t use Meta tags, then the search engines won’t really know what your content is all about. If the search engines is forced to figure it out by itself, then it can have an adverse effect on your contents visibility, overall. Proper Meta tags boosts both traffic and conversions.
- Not Prioritizing User Experience (UX)
This is one area that you do not want to neglect. If you do not consider user experience in your SEO efforts, it can badly effect your site. Dissatisfied users will oftentimes negatively review your site, which will deter others from visiting your site.
With little effort going into boosting your sites user experience, you can’t expect your brand image to be looked upon favourably. This is one SEO issue that a lot of webmasters fall into – so make sure you don’t fall into it yourself.
–AUTHOR INFO—
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk
