When starting your SEO journey, it is important to not over-optimizing your site content as it can result in just the opposite of what you were expecting. Most people make SEO mistakes while optimizing their site content because they want to rank higher in search results as quickly as possible.
They simply ignore search engine guidelines and optimize their website too much which causes their site to get penalized by search engines like Google as they have strict guidelines on SEO.
We don’t want our valuable readers of MultiplySEO to make that same mistake while starting off their SEO journey that’s why in this article we will cover common SEO mistakes to avoid so you can rank higher in Google without any worries. Let’s begin.
Common SEO mistakes to avoid
1. Publishing duplicate content
Content is king, Google has said this several times, so it is crucial to write original content because search engines penalize websites with duplicate content, so it’s essential to make sure that all of the content on your site is original.
If you don’t have time to write articles then you can hire a content writer to write original content for your site. One of the important things to note is that you should avoid generating and posting content from AI as it is against Google guidelines.
2. Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is one of the most common mistakes people do to rank higher on Google. Using too many keywords in your content can actually hurt your rankings. It’s important to use keywords naturally and in moderation.
Keywords help search engine to understand your website content. It is important to place target keywords in your piece of content at the right places where it looks natural so your content can easily be readable by your visitors.
Stuffing a lot of keywords sends a wrong signal to search engines as well as readers. It is better to write content for humans first and search engine second.
3. Ignoring Meta Tags
Meta tags are important, and title tags and meta descriptions play a major part in your on-page SEO strategy even though Google does not show meta descriptions in search results anymore, it still plays a crucial role in the overall SEO performance of your website.
So it is very crucial to include proper meta tags on every web page of your website as neglecting to use them or using them improperly can impact your rankings negatively.
Meta tags, such as title tags and meta descriptions, are an important part of on-page SEO. Neglecting to use them or using them improperly can impact your rankings.
4. Poor Readability & Content Structure
Poor readability and bad content structure are one of the most common SEO mistakes people made that should be avoided at all costs.
The content structure of your webpage should be optimized properly keeping in mind the ease of readability for your website visitors as well as for search engines to crawl and understand the context of your page.
The best way to avoid readability issues of your website is to use a responsive WordPress theme that is designed properly keeping in mind the content readability and structure.
5. Incorrect Header tags
The header tags are important to break down the content into a well-mannered structure. Header tag plays an important role in overall SEO optimization even search engine like Google use the H1 tag of the website often to display in search results.
So the heading structure of your website content must be in proper descending order and not miss any heading levels as it can negatively impact your SEO.
6. Slow Page Speed
The page speed of your website plays a crucial role in SEO. It comes under the technical SEO performance of your website. The page speed of your website also determines the ranking positions of your keywords in search results.
Page speed is one of the most important ranking factors of Google. You can check your website loading speed by visiting Google’s free tool called pagespeed insights. You can check your page speed score as well as details of issues and how you can fix them to improve the overall performance of your website.
The tool also provides information regarding core web vitals scores and issues related to it. Core web vitals is another important ranking factor created by Google which consists of LCP, FCP, and CLS optimization of your website.
7. Not optimized for mobile devices
Google gives high priority to those sites that are fast on mobile devices. The number of searches on mobile devices is probably higher than that on a desktop so it is important to optimize your website for mobile as a priority.
You can easily check whether website pages are usable for mobile devices by heading to the Google search console mobile usability tool. These tools will provide you with crucial information that will help you to improve the mobile-friendliness of your website.
8. Using black hat SEO tactics
One of the most common mistakes people do when starting off with an off-page SEO strategy is using black hat SEO tactics to create backlinks.
SEO practices to get backlinks like blog commenting, web 2.0 submissions, paid links, etc come under black hat SEO and for Google, these tactics are spammy and are against their search engine guidelines.
It is important to get backlinks in natural ways by creating high-quality original content that attracts links naturally to your site.
The best way to do that is by doing outreach and making connections with other bloggers that are relevant to your content niche and asking them to link to you because your content will help their readers also.
9. No Internal Linking
Internal linking is very powerful in SEO, doing internal linking properly can boost your organic traffic and will help you rank higher in SERPs. Most people avoid internal linking because they are simply too busy creating backlinks.
Internal linking is very impactful and it is easy to do, you can also use tools like ahrefs and Google search operators to find internal linking opportunities on your website. Internal links also play a major role in the crawling and indexability of your website.
10. Not implementing schema markups
Schema markups are a set of codes that provides information to search engine about the context and purpose of your website and its pages In more simple words it tells search engines whether your page is a blog post, service page, etc.
By understanding this, Google shows your website in a more proper way in search results and you get more search traffic to your site. You can input various types of schema markup on your pages to describe the purpose of your page to search engines,
One of the easiest ways to implement schema markup is by using WordPress plugins if your website is on WordPress or you can simply put schema code on each of your pages.
Conclusion
Above mentioned are some of the most common SEO mistakes to avoid when you are starting your SEO journey. We hope this article provided you with valuable information regarding SEO mistakes.
If you are someone looking for help implementing SEO strategies to rank higher in Google, you can book a free SEO call with our SEO consultant.
