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. When SEO is done correctly, you get that targeted traffic and they’ll also typically buy, 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.
Your main goal should be to get the search engines to approve of your site, not ban it completely. That’s why you need to learn common mistakes people make so that you can increase your chances of success. You’re about to learn about a few mistakes people make with search engines that hurt their chances of getting good traffic to their websites.
Taking On-Page SEO For Granted
On-page SEO is the most common mistake that webmasters and new internet marketers make. This is one of the only elements of SEO that you have complete control over. On-page SEO is basically how everything on your site is organized. This is really simple, your main concerns are your ALT tags, heading tags, file names, titles, and navigational structure. Including your main keywords in each element will make your site more search engine friendly. Don’t skip over this part of SEO. Your competition will be using these basic techniques so you should take it a step further.
Using the Wrong Keywords
The wrong keywords can bring you the wrong type of traffic. The best SEO starts with good keyword research. The traffic you get isn’t much targeted, which means it doesn’t convert and give results. Apart from that, choosing keywords that people aren’t searching for doesn’t really make sense. With the right keywords you are off to a running start; with the wrong keywords you might as well start over because you won’t win the race. Once you have found some high volume keywords you can start planning your site structure and themes. To assist you with your keyword research, several companies have keyword tools that you can use online for free to compile a keyword list for free.
Building Too Many Links
You must build links in order to stay competitive but getting too many at once will alert Google that you are a possible spammer and they will penalize your site. A common misconception is that if you blast your new site’s link out and get hundreds or thousands of links in a short period of time you will get high ranking. These spam tactics do not work anymore. Plain and simple, if you have a brand new site and it get hundreds or thousands of links pointing to it right away then Google will sandbox your site and de-index it. The big secret is to build links slow and steady.
Search engine optimization is a brilliant way to drive free traffic to your website and can give you great long term results. SEO is not a quick fix but when it works, it really works and for a long time too. It takes time to see results, which is perfectly fine. No matter what, don’t fall for all of the gimmicks, they work temporarily and then blow up in your face; if you stick with the long-term methods then you will still be around when the smoke clears.