No matter what type of site you have or what type of internet business, you need visitors from your target audience. To accomplish this, your site must rank high when it comes to the search engines. If you are good at your SEO, you will find that you not only get the traffic you want but your conversion rate will increase, too. However, if you are new to the whole SEO concept, then you might make mistakes that will harm your site on the long run.
You want to be favored by the search engines, not penalized by them. That is why it’s necessary to understand what you shouldn’t do so that you can succeed. You are about to read some blunders you shouldn’t make if you hope to get that targeted traffic that converts.
Broad Keywords
When people first start with a website, they often try SEO by using words that don’t specify anything. It is a true statement that SEO requires keywords, but too many keywords can get you penalized by the search engines because they’ll think you’re just spamming with your site. You’ll lose your ranking due to the over abundance of the keywords on your site, which means you’ll lose the traffic too. Readers aren’t going to like that very much, as they’re searching for clear, useful information.
Too Much Internal linking
Internal linking is the next big problem. Your site’s internal linking is all in your hands and it is an additional factor that you have 100% control over. Not only will your web pages rank higher, which results in more traffic but you will make your site more user friendly to its visitors. Instead of focusing on sending your visitors away you should concentrate on linking all of your related pages together in a logical fashion. Honestly, you probably won’t find another SEO technique that will give you such all around good results. And what makes it so great is that these are permanent results, not temporary. If you go to Wikipedia and search for something of interest, you will notice that they have links to many other related topics that are on their site, that is a prime example of internal linking.
Poorly Written Title and Description
Another common SEO mistake is having a poor title and description, which will eventually result in bad search engine ranking. Search engines use the title and description to try and figure out which theme is predominant within your text content and then rank you accordingly. Search engines have expanded and evolved from just a few years ago, incorporating more complex algorithms to try and please visitors, so it’s important to pay attention to the finer details.
So, if you want to simplify things, you can break SEO into on-page and off-page. Just practice your linking strategy, making sure you only link to relevant pages and get as many relevant links pointing to your site as you can and your site will rank higher automatically. It seems that Google is placing a large emphasis on the number of relevant backlinks that a site has so it would be wise to focus a little bit more of your time on getting them.