The difference between a company that gains prominence in the search engines and one that doesn’t is the specific strategies and techniques you or your SEO firm uses to promote your site. The wrong strategies can not only reduce your presence on the Internet but can have long-lasting impact on the effectiveness of any marketing you may do in the future.
Here are several common SEO mistakes which you should avoid:
Black Hat Methods
Black hat SEO methods include, for example, violating search engine rules or creating a bad user experience. Key word stuffing is a black hat method that places keywords multiple times on a web page just to try to get the attention of the search engines looking for those keywords. As the search engines get increasingly more sophisticated in identifying good content versus bad, keyword stuffing results in SEO penalties to the website employing this method.
Not Focusing on Buying Keywords
Not all keywords are alike. An important keyword concept is that of buying keywords. Buying keywords are words or phrases which would be used by a qualified buyer, as opposed to a researcher or a person casually interested in a topic.
Not Considering How to Present the Company from a Marketing Perspective
Simply getting lots of traffic to your website is not effective marketing. Once you get traffic to your site, you need a compelling enough message to engage the visitor and to get them to take the desired action. Your message on the home page is critically important because, once a potential customer arrives at your home page, you have only five seconds to capture their attention before they hit the back button on their browser, never to return again.
Not Measuring the Right Components
If you aren’t measuring the right components of your SEO activities you will not know what is working and what is not working. In addition, you will have no basis for testing different approach in terms of improving what you are doing now.
Going after High Traffic Keywords only Without Considering Competition
Another critical SEO mistake to avoid is going after high traffic keywords without considering how much competition there is for those keywords. It is much more difficult to rank highly for competitive keywords. A better strategy may be to go for multiple keywords that have less competition, delivering the desired traffic to your site more quickly. These “long tail” keyword approach may get more traffic to your site faster because there is less competition for their SEO ranking.
