While weathering a rough economy and an ultra-competitive business market, it’s important that your search engine optimization has the power to resonate with as much visibility possible. Below is a list of common but easily avoidable mistakes that even those well versed in search engine optimization can make. By employing careful diligence to seemingly benign elements such as URLs and keywords, you can greatly improve your search engine ranking.
1. Under-using keywords
Keywords are the cornerstone of SEO, so if you’re not maximizing their usage in your content, your optimization efforts may not yield the ranking you were hoping for. It is essential to use keywords wherever they can be placed in your content, even bolding or highlighting them to attain the greatest results. Make sure to not just repeat your keywords, but also choose related keywords in your article.
2. Choosing the wrong keywords
You may be writing a great article on “automotive trends,” but users could be looking for say, “car reviews” instead. Following keyword trends and their related corollaries are essential to achieving successful SEO results. Numerous tools are available for both research keyword trends and find related words often associated with said keywords.
3. Poorly organized site structure
Site structure, the backbone of a website, is used to index your content and relevance to a search. So, naturally, a site structure in disarray does not bode well for ranking. Having a well-organized site structure allows search engines to understand the purpose of your site, thus ranking you higher based on how much related content has been indexed.
4. Using images in place of text
Search engines cannot read the text of an image in for example, a company logo or bulleted list of products and services. So, if your site relies on images to relay information to the consumer, your efforts are invisible to search engines. Instead, your site should include as much actual text as possible and only utilize images for ascetics.
5. Not including keywords in URLs
This is a simple and often overlooked way to bolster your search engine visibility. By including the article’s focal keyword in the URL, you’ve enhanced the rankability of your site. For example, instead of using a default URL for a blog post, edit the URL to include your title (which of course will feature your keyword), separated with dashes (for example, www.yoursite.com/article-about-keyword).
