When people are marketing their website and trying to sit higher in search engines, they make some very common mistakes. I have highlighted some of main mistakes I see during my work and how they can be avoided.
Keyword Stuffing
One of the biggest mistakes I see in my job is keyword stuffing. This can also be called over-optimising. Many people and web designers think that adding your desired keyword into the copy on the web pages and the template, will increase the optimisation of the website. All search engines look for natural usage of the keyword within your body copy, they are all sensitive to over usage of keywords and can easily detect if you are stuffing the page. If you get caught keyword stuffing in your content, you are likely to have a penalty placed against your site. Keep your content naturally written, if your site is relevant to keyword and your content is well written, search engines will rank you accordingly.
Assuming Your Website Will Rank
One of the hardest jobs of an SEO specialist is to sell search engine optimisation, even harder is convincing people that standard SEO web practices will cause your site to rank better for its relevant keywords. Many website owners still believe that Google will rank their site in better positions just over time naturally, if your site is badly optimised, chances are that it will never rank as well as it could if it was well optimised. High search engine positions are never luck, you should always try to make your sites optimised as much as you naturally can, especially within an ecommerce sector.
Relying on Twitter and Facebook
Recently there has been a massive buzz around social networking sites, especially Facebook and Twitter, why not? They are great websites. But as link building websites are they any good? The correct answer is "no", both Facebook and Twitter do provide good traffic but they only supply "No Follow" links. This means that you will not receive any link power from these sites, if you are relying on these social sites to power your external links, you need to look elsewhere for better links to power your rankings.
Unethical Link Building
This is issue is arising more and more as companies seek to improve their rankings. Companies are approached by unethical SEO companies that promise to build high volume of links in a short space of time. Whilst these promises are true and links are generated, it is done in a manner that is unethical and ultimately that could see your site penalised by search engines for unethical tactics. If you manager your website's SEO company, ensure you know how your links are being generated.
Changing Too Much Too Soon
The final thing that I see a lot from some SEO specialists is changing too much and too often. Search engines take time to consider your page quality and all the other aspects of your page when you update something. You should make a few changes to your site and leave it alone for a good few weeks depending on how long it takes for your pages to be cached. Then you will be able to see the impact of your optimisation. If your impatient and change too much and often, your pages will dance around the listings and you will never know your true rank.
The best rule of thumb you can follow for search engine optimisation, is try to be natural in everything that you do. If you try too hard generally you will get penalised for it or never achieve your goal. My other comment is to ensure that you work with legitimate and ethical Search Engine Optimisation Companies.
The author Xavier Diaz is a professional search engine optimisation specialist, he works at
SEO Birmingham and has a large volume of
search engine optimisation clients.
