Instantser
Member
Hello wJunction members,
Lately, we have seen a lot of people shouting about having invested a lot of resources in Search Engine Optimization but haven't received an increase in their website's ranking in exchange. Worse yet, many of them have lost the Search Engine position they've had!
The sad truth is that at our company we see the same situation repeat itself over and over again. Thousands of websites losing their PageRank and their Search Engine Positions despite the exhausting efforts of webmasters oriented at, on the contrary, increasing them. This "strange phenomena" is easy to explain, however - their website is getting penalized for using outdated, non-ethical or plainly worthless SEO tactics. Google, in fact, has removed thousands of websites from their search engine by penalties of this kind - Panda and Penguin, just to name a few - we are sure that you have heard these words, and all the hatred associated to them.
You can easily avoid your website getting penalised, however, by learning about the Most frequently commited SEO mistakes and by avoiding them:
1. Reciprocal Links and Link Exchanges: This is one of the most despised SEO techniques by Search Engines such as Google. The links you build are artificial, do not lead to any informative content and create a false "credibility" for your site - 3 main things that Google tries to avoid. To avoid this mistake think of a link as a "compensation". A link to a website should mostly be used when the linked content is adequate and when it can help the reader by pointing them to additional resources on the subject or material related to it. If you see someone publish content that might be of use to your visitors - link to it. And wheter you believe in karma or not, the statistics tell that most of the time the linked website returns the favor, but this time, using a natural link to a worthy content of yours.
2. Creating content "just for SEO": As technology evolves, Search Engines also grow smarter. Nowadays, most search engines, including the major ones, are capable of recognizing useful and valuable content from useless pieces of text. And I am not talking about the nonsensical blocks of keywords that have been used by many websites years ago. These get your website removed from Google and other SEs practically at a moment.
I am talking basically about two types of content:
1) The non-unique, "rewritten", "spun" content, or however you want to call it. Although sometimes this content can be not bad at all, most of the time it is just worthless. Ask yourself, does the content provide value to your website? Does it tell something new? Does it inform people of something they didn't know? What are the chances that other webmasters will find the content interesting? What is the chance of them linking to it?
2) The completely useless content. It is easy to detect this one. Just ask yourself: who are you writing for? For the search engines or for your readers? If the answer is the former one and only the former one, chances are that your content is useless. And neither your readers nor search engines will apreciate it. Good content must be both optimized for the search engines and enjoyable to read for the readers. These two things just don't go apart!
3. Automatizing Social Media. Social media is supposed to exist just for it's purpose: to get social. It is used for people to exchange messages, share news and post interesting things that happened to them in the bus while driving to work. Some companies, however, use it as a cheap way of advertising: automatic messages, purchase of customers, promotion of products without even interacting with their fans. Just ask yourself, would you follow or like a company that treats their customers like this? And if for some strange reason you would, would you read the messages it posts? Probably not. Then why are you trying this tactic?
Automation is often used as an easy way out for companies that know they're supposed to "be social" but they don't want to be, they just know it's "important" for some reason and try to make the appearance that they indeed are social.
You're only fooling yourself. Social media gives you a voice. Trying to take the easy way out is like putting your company on mute. Speak with your customers, get to know them, and they will get back to you.
4. Blackhat SEO.
The days when you could play tricks on Google and get away with it have passed a long time ago. Nowadays, even the smallest intent of these tactics will get you out of the game. Creating 1 pixel images and putting the keywords of the interest in it's alt tags, spreading your keywords across the webpage and changing their font color to the background color of the webpage or simply repeating your keywords again and again won't get you any far. Search Engines are easily able to detect these techniques and will indubitably penalize you for using them.
5. Ignoring your website's design.
Many people don't consider web design to be a valuable element when it comes to SEO, and this is a huge mistake. You may have cool flash effects and javascripts and all you ever wish, but let's also remember the professional side of the question. Your website is your company's image. It can say a lot about you and your brand. I see hundreds of people paying huge money for a website just to later remake it into a non-functional, not SEO friendly or plainly an ugly combination of letters, images and effects.
Save yourself your valuable time and money and purchase a webdesign for your service from an affordable (and express, if time is really valuable to you) web design team. After all, website design and creation is one of our main concerns, and as such we are willing to invest as much time and effort as needed into the process.
At the same time, you should also hire a good SEO expert, or a team of SEO experts. This person will work with the designers and the developers of your website to ensure that what you end up with not only with a website adapted to your needs but that also compiles with it's aim in Search Engines.
Do not ignore your webdesign, as neither your visitors nor search engines are doing it.
6. Focusing on Google Only. Are you even aware that there are thousands of other search engines around? Chances are that you are receiving a big part of your website's traffic not only from Google, but also from Bing, Yahoo and other search engines as well as directories. Have you submitted your website to other search engines? And to web directories? And have you optimized it correctly for them? Perhaps what is acceptable for Google, is not acceptable for Bing. Give this a thought.
7. Choose your global goal and focus. This is the last of my advices, but yet the most important one.
You should choose one big goal for your website and do everything to attain it. This applies to your website's productivity, design, content and SEO. Many webmasters do not understant it and just try one SEO tactic or another without any other purpose than to effortlessly boost their traffic during a short interval of time. This is the pattern of SEO that generally results in penalties towards your website from SEs and a fail at marketing in general. Choose your main goal, let it be to be the number one website providing X service, or to rank in the #1 position for keywords X, Y and Z, and use different SEO tactics to get closer to this goal.
These in my opinion are the main SEO mistakes made both by beginner and advanced webmasters. If you are developing a SEO plan for either your website, or your client's one, make sure you went through this list and haven't comitted one of these errors.
By the way, what are the most common errors in SEO in your opinion?
Best Regards,
SEO Team of Instantser.com
Lately, we have seen a lot of people shouting about having invested a lot of resources in Search Engine Optimization but haven't received an increase in their website's ranking in exchange. Worse yet, many of them have lost the Search Engine position they've had!
The sad truth is that at our company we see the same situation repeat itself over and over again. Thousands of websites losing their PageRank and their Search Engine Positions despite the exhausting efforts of webmasters oriented at, on the contrary, increasing them. This "strange phenomena" is easy to explain, however - their website is getting penalized for using outdated, non-ethical or plainly worthless SEO tactics. Google, in fact, has removed thousands of websites from their search engine by penalties of this kind - Panda and Penguin, just to name a few - we are sure that you have heard these words, and all the hatred associated to them.
You can easily avoid your website getting penalised, however, by learning about the Most frequently commited SEO mistakes and by avoiding them:
1. Reciprocal Links and Link Exchanges: This is one of the most despised SEO techniques by Search Engines such as Google. The links you build are artificial, do not lead to any informative content and create a false "credibility" for your site - 3 main things that Google tries to avoid. To avoid this mistake think of a link as a "compensation". A link to a website should mostly be used when the linked content is adequate and when it can help the reader by pointing them to additional resources on the subject or material related to it. If you see someone publish content that might be of use to your visitors - link to it. And wheter you believe in karma or not, the statistics tell that most of the time the linked website returns the favor, but this time, using a natural link to a worthy content of yours.
2. Creating content "just for SEO": As technology evolves, Search Engines also grow smarter. Nowadays, most search engines, including the major ones, are capable of recognizing useful and valuable content from useless pieces of text. And I am not talking about the nonsensical blocks of keywords that have been used by many websites years ago. These get your website removed from Google and other SEs practically at a moment.
I am talking basically about two types of content:
1) The non-unique, "rewritten", "spun" content, or however you want to call it. Although sometimes this content can be not bad at all, most of the time it is just worthless. Ask yourself, does the content provide value to your website? Does it tell something new? Does it inform people of something they didn't know? What are the chances that other webmasters will find the content interesting? What is the chance of them linking to it?
2) The completely useless content. It is easy to detect this one. Just ask yourself: who are you writing for? For the search engines or for your readers? If the answer is the former one and only the former one, chances are that your content is useless. And neither your readers nor search engines will apreciate it. Good content must be both optimized for the search engines and enjoyable to read for the readers. These two things just don't go apart!
3. Automatizing Social Media. Social media is supposed to exist just for it's purpose: to get social. It is used for people to exchange messages, share news and post interesting things that happened to them in the bus while driving to work. Some companies, however, use it as a cheap way of advertising: automatic messages, purchase of customers, promotion of products without even interacting with their fans. Just ask yourself, would you follow or like a company that treats their customers like this? And if for some strange reason you would, would you read the messages it posts? Probably not. Then why are you trying this tactic?
Automation is often used as an easy way out for companies that know they're supposed to "be social" but they don't want to be, they just know it's "important" for some reason and try to make the appearance that they indeed are social.
You're only fooling yourself. Social media gives you a voice. Trying to take the easy way out is like putting your company on mute. Speak with your customers, get to know them, and they will get back to you.
4. Blackhat SEO.
The days when you could play tricks on Google and get away with it have passed a long time ago. Nowadays, even the smallest intent of these tactics will get you out of the game. Creating 1 pixel images and putting the keywords of the interest in it's alt tags, spreading your keywords across the webpage and changing their font color to the background color of the webpage or simply repeating your keywords again and again won't get you any far. Search Engines are easily able to detect these techniques and will indubitably penalize you for using them.
5. Ignoring your website's design.
Many people don't consider web design to be a valuable element when it comes to SEO, and this is a huge mistake. You may have cool flash effects and javascripts and all you ever wish, but let's also remember the professional side of the question. Your website is your company's image. It can say a lot about you and your brand. I see hundreds of people paying huge money for a website just to later remake it into a non-functional, not SEO friendly or plainly an ugly combination of letters, images and effects.
Save yourself your valuable time and money and purchase a webdesign for your service from an affordable (and express, if time is really valuable to you) web design team. After all, website design and creation is one of our main concerns, and as such we are willing to invest as much time and effort as needed into the process.
At the same time, you should also hire a good SEO expert, or a team of SEO experts. This person will work with the designers and the developers of your website to ensure that what you end up with not only with a website adapted to your needs but that also compiles with it's aim in Search Engines.
Do not ignore your webdesign, as neither your visitors nor search engines are doing it.
6. Focusing on Google Only. Are you even aware that there are thousands of other search engines around? Chances are that you are receiving a big part of your website's traffic not only from Google, but also from Bing, Yahoo and other search engines as well as directories. Have you submitted your website to other search engines? And to web directories? And have you optimized it correctly for them? Perhaps what is acceptable for Google, is not acceptable for Bing. Give this a thought.
7. Choose your global goal and focus. This is the last of my advices, but yet the most important one.
You should choose one big goal for your website and do everything to attain it. This applies to your website's productivity, design, content and SEO. Many webmasters do not understant it and just try one SEO tactic or another without any other purpose than to effortlessly boost their traffic during a short interval of time. This is the pattern of SEO that generally results in penalties towards your website from SEs and a fail at marketing in general. Choose your main goal, let it be to be the number one website providing X service, or to rank in the #1 position for keywords X, Y and Z, and use different SEO tactics to get closer to this goal.
These in my opinion are the main SEO mistakes made both by beginner and advanced webmasters. If you are developing a SEO plan for either your website, or your client's one, make sure you went through this list and haven't comitted one of these errors.
By the way, what are the most common errors in SEO in your opinion?
Best Regards,
SEO Team of Instantser.com
Last edited: