Seeing that you don’t really have to be particularly tech-savvy to make a website, and that anyone who does have one probably wouldn’t mind the increased online exposure, there have been a lot of semi-informed people trying to be their own SEO. Since SEO is a delicate discipline, trying to do it yourself could not only lead to hours of effort being wasted on an activity that will never provide results, but also to getting your site indexed and making it almost impossible for it to be shown in SERPs ever again.
That’s why we have created a list of the most common and potentially harmful SEO mistakes that people seem to be making day after day.
Relying on Black Hat Techniques
You may have heard about different approaches to SEO described as white, gray, and black hat. While white hat is used to denote ethical, Google-approved practices for increasing your visibility, black hat stands for unethical practices, which all major search engines frown upon, and which can easily get you deindexed. Among others, this includes keyword stuffing, cloaking (which often goes hand in hand with the previous method), and site scraping, and others.
There was a time when you could achieve some results with these techniques, although they were never successful over the long term. These days, with all the advances in search algorithms, search engines are getting very proficient at recognizing attempted exploits and are quite merciless in punishing them. Stick to white hat, and even though it might take a while to see your site climb rankings, you’ll know that you are not only wasting your efforts.
Duplicated Pages
There are several reasons for having different versions of the same page, but you should make sure to give crawlers a pointer to which one of them is the ‘genuine one’ by making it canonical. This issue is especially serious if you have different versions of your home page, as your incoming link value will be dispersed across different versions, leaving you with only a fragment of potential value.
Disregarding On-site Optimization
People often see SEO as only consisting of ways to get a link to your website on as many sites as possible, but nothing could be further from the truth. One of the essential parts of every SEO campaign is a good on-site. This includes sorting the title tags on your pages, which means trying to insert the keyword that you want the page to rank f in its title; organizing your internal linking structure, i.e. Making sure that you emphasize your most important pages by linking to them from your most visited pages; providing an XML sitemap, which will make it easier for spiders to crawl your website; keeping your bounce rate as low as possible and your page loading times at an absolute minimum; and several other things that will improve your chances of ranking and the user experience of your audience.
Making sure you aren’t making any of these most common mistakes is a great starting point. There’s more to address, of course, but with a little bit of planning, you can go a long way – while preserving good rankings and getting the most out of your website optimization.
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