A Do Nots Guide for SEO: Explore Your Mistakes

If you have a website on the internet for whatever reason, there is a high chance of you hearing about SEO. As you may already know, SEO means search engine optimization, and the name is pretty self-explanatory. Regardless of what kind of a website you have, your aim is to increase the traffic on your website, read your posts, or purchase through it if you have a digital business. Here, we have prepared a detailed do nots guide for SEO!

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Best Do Nots Guide For SEO: Why Do You Need It?

Increasing the organic traffic can help you a lot for various. At the end of the day, your aim of creating a website was to have a big audience, wasn’t it? Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to increase the organic traffic on your website by using the search engine’s optimization and making it easier for people to find your website. The number of websites on the internet is tremendous, and it might be difficult for your website to step up from others if you do not have search engine optimization knowledge. However, search engine optimization might not be enough – you should also be aware of the things that can be presented to you as a good SEO technique, but in fact, it isn’t.

On this page, you can find detailed information about things to avoid in SEO. Everywhere is full of information available for you, but not all of them would be beneficial for you. SEO knowledge is crucial for your website, and no one would want to use the wrong methods that could possibly hurt their website’s success. Let’s take a look at what you should definitely avoid if you want to successfully implement SEO on your website.

Going Freestyle with your Audience

The first SEO mistake to avoid is not knowing your audience and just going with whatever you feel like. It might sound like an innocent mistake, but the thing is, not knowing your audience can ruin your website in the worst way possible. At the end of the day, you need to create content for your target audience. If you create content that is not connected with your audience, how would it be possible for them to find your website and stick with it? Additionally, search engine algorithms consider many things while showing the results, and relevance is one of the most important details at this point. See also: What is User Search Intent & Customer Acquisition

What can you do instead? – Guide For SEO

The content on your website should be strongly connected to your target audience. What is mentioned here by knowing your audience is not about just knowing the age group, gender, and socioeconomic status they take place in. You should have an insight into the target audiences’ behavior. You need to be careful about the words they would prefer to find the content on your website to be actually in their sight. Sometimes just using the common keywords on your content would not be enough – you need to think like your target audience. Here are some tips that might help you through getting to know your audience:

• You can research customer behavior depending on what kind of content you have. At the end of the day, what you are trying to do is somehow similar to marketing.

• You can check and track your progress on your website to see what kinds of actions your visitors have on your website.

• Compare and contrast your website with other successful websites that are similar to yours and see how they can inspire your website while maintaining originality.

Not Being Original

The next mistake you should most definitely avoid in SEO content would be not being original. Search engine algorithms are smarter than any of us while detecting plagiarism, and they would not tolerate it by any means. You should be offering unique and original content on your website. If you copy it from somewhere else, the search engine algorithm will most definitely detect it, and it would consider it as spam content. This means that your website can go at the very bottom of the results page once your target audience searched it from the search engine.

As you already know, there are millions of results come up to you when you search for a specific keyword in search engines. You should also know that no people on earth take a look at every single of those pages – they just look at the first several links, and if they seem to not find what they are looking for, they might look at other ones as well. But the thing is, your website showing on the top of the results page would be one hundred percent beneficial for you. You would not want to miss out on your target audience visiting your website.

What can you do instead? – Guide For SEO

The contents of the web are endless. You might think that creating original content is impossible. But the thing is, it is not as rigid as you think. Of course, there will be pages with similar content to what you have in mind; this is one of the main themes of websites. You can talk about the same subject on any other given website. But in terms of word choice, planning, and design, your website should be unique if you want to have successful SEO on your website.

You can do a quick research about the topic you want to talk about, see what other websites did, and start to create your unique and original content. Keep in mind that your aim is to use SEO knowledge on your website to make people click on your website. You need to offer both the search engine algorithm and your target audience something unique to achieve this. Here are some tips for creating unique and original content for your website:

• Have your style of communication. The way you speak to your audience, the words you choose, and the planning of your sentences should be unique.

• Give real-life examples that you encounter. The chances of someone else encountering the exact same situation with you are pretty low, so the experiences you had are a great tool to create original content.

• Support your content with visual and auditory content. It would help you to have an original and unique design on your website.

• Support your content with credible sources when needed. If you intend to take information from somewhere else, make sure that you use references to the original source.

Underestimating Mobile Devices

Another common SEO mistake that you should avoid is to underestimate the mobile device traffic on websites. Most of the time, people assume that websites are only visited through computers or big screens such as laptops and tablets. But the situation is very different from that; many people use their mobile devices to search on websites. Your website can look perfect on computers, but this does not necessarily mean that the mobile device experience on your website will be just as good.

It is a common mistake to think of SEO just as being top of the search results through correct content and keyword use. It is a big part of SEO, but it is not all. The quality of the website is also very important for SEO. If your website has a poor mobile device quality, the result of it would be having a bad place on the search engine results page (SERP). See also: Mobile-First Indexing.

What can you do instead? – Guide For SEO

If there is a problem, there is a solution in SEO. By giving importance to the website’s quality on mobile devices, you can avoid this SEO mistake easily. Providing a good mobile device experience for your website might sound a lot, but when you think of the results, it really isn’t.  one of the most important things you should consider would be the load time of your website. Having a short load time would be very helpful for your website’s SEO. You can also create a different content type for mobile devices that would work better in there.

Not Tracking Progress

Another SEO mistake that you should definitely avoid is not tracking progress. You are using SEO to optimize the traffic on your website, and not tracking progress would be a big mistake. The internet and your content (hopefully) are in constant change to meet people’s needs, and the necessary actions would not always be the same. You cannot see how things are doing with the SEO techniques you use without tracking the progress. One thing that you think works perfectly might actually ruining your website without you noticing.

What is meant here by progress is not just the numbers. In other words, progress does not solely mean how many people clicked to your website or the rate of organic traffic.  What is meant by progress is how different SEO methods to influence what kind of content. Your website consists of many things, and they all need different things to be optimized. You need to know what is serving your website and what does not to change things for the better.

What can you do instead? – Guide For SEO

Tracking progress might sound like a complex and big thing where you would struggle a lot. But the thing is, you do not need to draw graphs and analyze results on your own. There are many platforms and tools that have this very service for your website. Through those tools and platforms, you can see everything that is going on your website in terms of SEO. Using those tools and platforms would give you the insight you need for your website to be able to have control. Besides, you will be able to understand how different SEO methods have an effect on different kinds of content have you have on your website.

Focusing only on Text Content

Text content is a big part of most websites. Since the situation is like this, it might be easy to overlook other types of content on your website. This is one of the biggest SEO mistakes that you can make. Your website is not all about texts; there are images, perhaps videos, or auditory content as well. Not giving the needed significance to other sorts of content in your website can ruin the quality of your website. Here are some of the most common SEO content mistakes while focusing only on text content:

• Using bad quality pictures
• Using small pictures
• Using irrelevant pictures
• Having low-quality videos on your website
• Having broken images and/ or videos
• Not having alt text on your visuals

What can you do instead?

Poor visual and auditory content on your website can ruin the experience that your audience will have, and you should avoid it by any means possible. Avoiding this mistake is very simple; the only thing you need to do would be to be more cautious. Make sure that the image you will put on the website is relevant to your content and has a high quality.

Another important detail in other content rather than the text content is adding alt texts. Alt texts come in very handy, especially when the image or other visual content you put on the website is not working for whatever reason. With the alt text, everyone will be able to see what is going on in the image. It is a very sustainable and meaningful way of providing a quality experience on your website.

Not Having a Plan

All the things you do to optimize your website require a plan. You cannot have wonderful results with SEO, and you should have a plan. If you want to achieve a special goal, you need to have a plan in order to have it. If you try to explore what you can get with SEO without planning, the quality and the traffic on your website can be worse.

In the digital world, everything done without a plan is not optimal for you to have the best results. Not giving optimal results is not in SEO’s nature, but without a proper plan, you can ruin the nature of SEO. Your content and web design need a proper plan.

What can you do instead? – Guide For SEO

If you are feeling lost when it comes to having an SEO plan, the situation is not as complicated as you think. The only thing you need to do will be to know your target audience and your goal in detail. Getting to know your audience might need a little bit of effort, but it is worth it. Once you know your target audience and your goal on your website, you can create your plan easier than ever.

Underestimating Google Reviews

Another important detail on SEO is to not take Google reviews into consideration. Most of the people who are using search engines take Google reviews very seriously. If you are not checking your website’s Google reviews, it means that you are making a big mistake. All people that see the Google reviews of your website can write a comment and rate it. The bad comments on Google review easily influence people, and it can decrease the traffic you will get from your website.  

What can you do instead? – Guide For SEO

You need to take Google reviews seriously and check them regularly to see what people are commenting on your website. Then, even though you have bad reviews, you can use them in favor of you. Bad reviews are still reviewing, and you can interact with people through this channel. It would help your website a lot since people would see that you actually care about the opinions of people who are visiting your website.

You may ask what was wrong about their experience to the owners of bad reviews. Additionally, you can advise them of some tips they can use to not encounter any sort of unfortunate event in the future. Finally, if the problem seems a little too big, you can ask for their contact information to take care of the situation in detail.

It’s not always had to be about bad reviews. There can also be good reviews, and you should also interact with them. Interacting with good reviews would encourage others to share their nice words about your website, hence increasing the positive thoughts on your website.

Wrong Meta Use

If you have the littlest amount of SEO knowledge, you should know that adding meta to your content is a wonderful tool that would help you a lot. However, you should also know the difference between meta titles and meta descriptions on your website to be able to achieve the best results possible. Meta title and the meta description will be the very first thing that people will see about your website, and wrong meta use can cast out people from your website, which is something that you would not want to happen.

There are several reasons why using the wrong meta is a serious SEO mistake that must be avoided for whatever it takes. You should also note that even though meta use is not directly related to SEO success, they are related. Meta use influences the click-through rate of your website, which will eventually affect SEO. iIfthe meta title and meta description are misleading, the page’s search engine optimization will be pretty low. In other words, if you do not have what was promised on meta title and meta description, the algorithm will not have you on the top of SERP.

What can you do instead? – Guide For SEO

Now that you know wrong meta use is a terrible mistake to have for SEO, you can avoid this mistake. But simply avoiding something wrong in SEO would not create the best results. You should also know the right way and how you can use this knowledge for optimal SEO success. So here are some tips for meta title and meta description use for your website:

• Keep in mind that a meta title should be between 50 to 60 characters. However, this range can change according to the character width of the search engine.

• Ensure that your meta title and meta description are not misleading and clearly explain what the page is about.

• Do not forget to use keywords on your title. However, you should be careful about that the optimal use of those keywords. Trying to include all the relevant words in your meta title would not help.

• Including the brand name on the meta title would help a lot if your page is about your digital business or business.

• Try to minimize keyword use to two keywords in the meta title.

Not Being Careful with Internal Links

An internal link is a big part of SEO, and when they are used correctly, it can help you a lot. However, in the wrong use, they would not be so helpful. An example of the wrong use of internal links would be randomly choosing links to place in content. Internal links are mainly used to lead people to content within the website that they might find interesting. However, the internal link should be related to the content that it was put in. Putting too many internal links is also an SEO mistake that you should be avoiding.

What can you do instead? – Guide For SEO

An internal link is a great tool to increase traffic and search engine optimization only if it is used correctly. The following are some tips for you to have an insight about using internal links correctly.

• Use internal links only if they are necessary with the contents.

• Do not use too many internal links just to have them on your content.

• Do not include any broken links or pages that would take forever to load.

• Make sure that the internal links are well-prepared.

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