Six SEO Mistakes that Prevent You From Ranking in Google

There are many marketing strategies to employ when you are trying to garner more traffic for your website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remains one of the most prominent promotion methods. SEO allows you, through the use of certain keywords or phrases, to increase your ranking with the search engines on the Internet. This means, when someone types in a word or series of words in a search engine, if it pertains to your topic or pages contain the correct words, your site will turn up in the search. The goal is to be among the top sites viewed so you can increase your traffic. While it is a great marketing approach, there are some SEO mistakes to avoid if you want to keep your site from falling in the rankings.

1. Optimizing One Spot Only

When you are using keywords and phrases to optimize your website, try to avoid the mistake of only optimizing one page or location. Keep in mind, your site is more than just your home page and the rest of the site needs to be optimized as well. This will help to boost all of your pages in the rankings with search engines and not just one page on your site. It greatly enhances your chances of being located if more than one page of your site is ready for search engine indexing.

2. Overusing Keywords

Some people try to cram as many keywords as possible onto their website or into their pages. This not only makes the page itself look sloppy, it makes it unreadable or too difficult to understand. Overusing the keywords can lead to many awkward sentences and to having a lot of grammar errors for the sake of getting the keywords into the space. Readers can actually be put off by this. They may believe little care or thought was put into the website due to the many errors or illegibility. This may cause them to leave the site all together because they do not want to struggle through it. Try to find a good balance of use of the keywords so that all of your sentences flow together in a coherent, correct manner.

3. Not Having Keyword Strategy

There is much more to SEO than just placing keywords all over your pages. You need to have a strategic plan of exactly what words you are going to use, how you are going to use them, where they are going to go and how often each will appear. Having a plan will make the layout of the page much more effective and it will make it read better for the users who come to your page. If you have a concentration of a small number of keywords in one area, it will be much more effective than having words scattered all over your pages. You want to use the words in a manner that you would expect the user on the other side to use them so that when they search for a word or a phrase, you stand a good chance of having exactly the phrase they have used to search.

4. Using Too Many Images on Your Site

While many believe people like to see images on your website, the fact is, too many images on your page or using images as links to other content is not something the search engines are designed to pick up, so you will get lost in the shuffle and your rankings will suffer for it. You are much better using a few strategically placed images and going with much more written content that the search engines are designed to index and find. This will improve your ranking and you will be more easily noticed by those searching the Internet.

5. Using Broken or Inactive Links

Many people include links on their website because it helps to create more back links so people will find their site. It can also help to be connected with links to bigger websites – this can help create more traffic for you and improve you search engine ranking. The problem is, many don’t bother to check the links again after putting them up on the page. Some of these links may become inactive or lead nowhere after a while even if you still have them on your site. Search engine indexes are likely to lower your ranking if it notices that many of your links go nowhere. Make it a regular practice to check the links on your site just to make sure they are all active and you can eliminate any bad or broken links.

6. Using the Same Title For All Your Pages

This is a common mistake many people make and do not give much thought to. If a search sees that all of your pages are using the same title, it will assume all of your pages have the same content as well. This will penalize you in the rankings. It is important for you to have individual titles for each of your pages to make each a unique entity of its own. You should try to incorporate keywords into your titles as well because titles are one of the first things a search engine looks at when seeking information.

Once you have learned what SEO mistakes to avoid, you can go about setting up your site so it stays constantly productive for you. The strategies you use take some work and effort on your part. SEO is not something you can just do once and leave alone, so be prepared to put work into the process if you want to get rewards from it.

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