From improving your website for wrong keywords to creating similar doorway pages, be sure not to make the following 7 SEO Rookie Mistakes moves to protect your search rankings.
Half-minute summary:
- Search Engine Optimization is an increasingly important area of practice for businesses to gain visibility. However, if it’s not done correctly it can easily slow down or even harm your online visibility.
- Optimizing your website for the wrong keywords, putting too many keywords in the meta keywords tag, or creating lots of similar doorway pages could hurt your business instead of helping.
- This list of SEO mistakes will help you be future-ready.
Using SEO, marketers can improve their websites’ rankings in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), which can help them to reach the top results.
While doing SEO you should avoid making certain common SEO mistakes.
If any of these mistakes are made, marketers may end up harming their search ranking and reputation.
Here are seven of the common mistakes that you must avoid.
SEO Rookie Mistake #1: It is a mistake Optimizing your site for the wrong keywords
To rank for your keywords, you need to pick the right keywords first. You should first choose the right keywords and then spend time trying to get your site a high ranking, but not more time than you need.
If you want to rank for the high-volume keywords that bring in the most traffic to your site, you need to optimize your page to attract the highest amount of traffic to your website.
The good news is that there are some warning signs that can alert you to the fact that you may be Optimizing for the wrong keywords. We find the following among these.
- Having little to no organic visibility
- Having high impressions and low click-through rates.
- There is a high bounce rate or a low time on the page.
When you focus on optimization for the keywords that best match the needs of your visitors and customers, you are better off, because it’s more likely you will get found on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
And worse, you’ll experience a high bounce rate, because search engine users who eventually find your web site will leave without doing anything that you want them to do. …..In fact, not optimizing site content for the right keywords will cripple your search engine rankings.
SEO Rookie Mistake #2: It is a mistake to put too many keywords in the meta keywords tag
Many times we see sites that have hundreds of keywords listed in the meta keywords tag, hoping that will get them a high ranking for those keywords.
If you’re wondering whether or not meta keyword tags affect your search engine ranking, then you’ve made the right decision to read this article. In fact, Google doesn’t use keyword meta tags directly in its algorithm, but they do affect your search engine positioning.
You will never be able to get a high ranking if you list the same things in the meta keywords tag. There is no correlation between your search engine rank and the Meta tag you put into it. Adding the keywords to the actual body content on the page will help you get a high ranking for those.
SEO Rookie Mistake #3: The same Keywords are repeated too many times.
People often spend too much time and energy optimizing their landing pages and their meta tags for their target keywords.
This strategy is called keyword stuffing and has been used by millions of websites in the past, which means it’s a well-known search engine tactic.
Sure, you do need to repeat the keywords several times.
But, the way you place the keywords in your pages should make grammatical sense.
It’s not that people don’t want to buy from your website, it’s that they don’t know what they’re looking for or they’re overwhelmed by the choices.
Furthermore, a particular keyword shouldn’t be used more than three times in your Meta Keywords tag.
SEO Rookie Mistake #4: Lots of similar doorway pages were created.
This is another common misconception that causes you to get in trouble when you think about optimizing your website for Google.
This is great in theory, but in practice it’s counterproductive.
You’ll have to deal with hundreds of pages, which can become an administrative nightmare.
If you want to become a success on the internet, you need to stay up to date on how Google is changing its algorithm, as this is what determines your ranking in search results.
Moreover, although the pages are meant for different search engines, they will eventually end up being pretty similar to each other.
Search engines can often detect when a site has created similar content, and they may penalize or even ban this site from their index.
According to Google,
“…they (Doorway Pages) can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.”
SEO Rookie Mistake #5: Hidden text is used.
The hidden text on your page is the same color as the background color. If the background color of your page is white, then you have added some white text to the page. The practice is considered a black-hat practice.
In order to get high rankings in search engines, many webmasters try to make their pages as rich in content as possible. There is a limit to the number of keywords you can repeat on a page without making it seem odd to your human visitors.
In order to ensure that the human visitors to a page don’t perceive the text to be weird, many webmasters add text with the same color as the background color. Human visitors can’t see the keywords that can be seen by search engines.
Search engines penalize or ignore pages that contain such text because they have caught on to this technique. If one of the pages on that site contains hidden text, they may penalize the entire site.
The problem with this is that search engines can often penalize sites that do not intend to use hidden text. Suppose you have a page with a white background and a table on the same page with a black background If you have added some white text to that table, then you must have done something.
This text should not be called hidden text, because it will be visible to your human visitors. Even though the background of the table is black, search engines can still interpret this as hidden text.
They state that they received official guidance from Google
“Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”
In order to make sure that your site isn’t penalized because of this, you should go through all the pages on your site and see if you have made any mistakes.
SEO Rookie Mistake #6: The page cloaking is used.
By definition, cloaking is against Google’s webmaster guidelines.
“Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agents may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index”
A lot of sites use cloaking because they want to make it easier for their users to access the pages of their site without having to click through any search results. If they use cloaking, though, search engines won’t be able to see the same pages that their users will see.
Even if the search engines can’t find something, they can’t have the confidence in providing relevant results to their users.
Because cloaking isn’t allowed by Google, it won’t show up in their search results. It won’t be indexed or indexed very well by other search engines, either.
If you do want to cloak, you need to be aware that cloaking will put you on the watch list of Google, and if you are doing it in a blatant manner you will be blacklisted not only that, you may have to pay the price to be reinstated to the search engine.
SEO Rookie Mistake #7: Too much time is being spent on search engine positioning.
Of course, there’s another mistake that people make when it comes to SEO – they spend too much time on it.
Sure, you must spend time every day learning about search engines and how they work, and you should optimize your site for the search engines.
Search engine optimization is a necessary part of growing your online business, but it’s not an end in itself.
When you have a great product, you’ll make more sales, which will make you more money, which and give you a better chance to achieve your goals.
Hence, apart from trying to improve your site’s position in the search engines, you also need to spend time on all the other factors which determine the success or the failure of your website – the quality of the products and services that you are offering, the quality of your content, and so on.
If you have good rankings in search engines and produce high-quality SEO content, you will see your business grow by leaps and bounds.