Keep Your SEO Safe: 4 SEO Mistakes To Avoid

SEO is complicated, and it’s easy to make mistakes. Mistakes you want to avoid.

Google keeps changing the rules, and it can be challenging for anyone to keep up.

But not keeping up with the rules makes it harder to keep your SEO safe.

So how can you avoid penalties or bad practices?

Here are 4 SEO mistakes to avoid:

1. SEO Mistakes to Avoid: Bad Links

Not all links are made the same. Once upon a time, any kind of link was acceptable.

Having “junk” links on your site could be a huge mistake.

Google has changed their rules, and for a good reason.

They want sites to contain organic links, so the user has a better experience. You should too.

Here are the links Google will penalize you for:

• Paid permanent or rented links 
• Automatic link purchase and generation
• Using social bookmarking to spam links
• Using microsites, satellite, and private blog networks
• Link spamming on directory sites

Google is looking for organic links to and from your site.

2. Mistaking Clutter for Content

Google wants people to enjoy their online experience.

As a result, your digital marketing must keep up to avoid being penalized by Google or, worse, losing prospective clients.

Cluttering up your site or blog with too much information, ads, links, popups, etc., detracts from the users’ experience.

Most people will leave a cluttered site because they feel overwhelmed.

To keep both your potential clients and Google happy, avoid the following:

• Placing ads above content – people want the information they came to your site for not to be inundated with advertising
• Auto-playing videos or ads – people don’t want to be forced to watch something. Instead, they prefer to feel as though they are in control.
• Forced popups – again, no one likes to be forced to view something
• Misleading advertising or links – Fairly obvious; no one wants to be lied to or mislead
• Excessive pagination to receive more views – in other words, the viewer must keep clicking to see all your content which wastes their time and annoys them.

Google rewards sites that cater to what the users want to see and experience. It enhances the customer experience.

So will your customers.

 3. Not Using Google’s Toolbox to Increase SEO

Did you know your website could have errors hurting your SEO ranking?

Luckily Google has provided us with marketing tools to help us maximize our websites.

Here are just a few SEO mistakes to avoid:

• Bad links
• Crawl errors
• Duplicate titles and descriptions

These tools will also provide you with invaluable information such as:

• The health of your website
• How many pages are indexed by search engines
• How many links are pointing to your site

Google will even set you up with e-mail alerts to help keep you up-to-date and SEO savvy. 

 4. Content: Value vs Fluff?

Publish or perish- that’s the general rule for effective SEO and digital marketing.

However, if your content is irrelevant to your website, Google will know.

So will your potential clients.

Content is about SEO, keywords and knowing your customer:

• Who is your audience?
• What action do you want them to take?
• What information will be most relevant?
• Why should they keep coming back to your site?

Google rewards sites that add value and are credible to the viewer experience.

For those still struggling to understand SEO or simply don’t want to spend the time on it, contact us. We’d be happy to help!