3 SEO Mistakes To Avoid

In terms of website visibility and the ongoing success of your business, SEO (search engine optimization) is still one of the most powerful assets you have available to you in the modern era. Having said that, the SEO game in general is also constantly changing - the best practices of even a year ago are, by and large, woefully inadequate today.

Because of that, there are a number of critical modern day SEO mistakes that you would do well to avoid at all costs.

the keyword conundrum

Gone are the days where SEO success was all about stuffing as many keywords into the copy on your website as possible. These days, not only is that an ineffective way to rank highly in search engines - it's also a great way to get you penalized by sites like Google, too. You must resist the urge to keyword stuff because any gains that you do see will be short-lived at best and the consequences of getting caught are far too severe to risk.

Having said that, none of this means that keywords aren't important in terms of modern day SEO - far from it. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that people often make involves not using too many keywords, but too many of the wrong keywords.

Keyword selection is all about A) understanding as much about your audience as possible so that you can learn the words they would likely use to find your business, and B) utilizing keywords the way your users are, too. These days, that means paying particularly close attention to long-tail keywords and even phrases that people might type into Google to find a business like yours. If all of your keywords are still one or two words at maximum, you're probably leaving a lot of potential clicks on the proverbial table.

you're building your content in the wrong way

Along the same lines, another one of the most common SEO mistakes that people tend to make involves not necessarily having the right type of content, but having the wrong type of content to start with.

Remember those keywords we were discussing earlier? One of the major reasons why they're so important is because they're what every last piece of content that you create should be built around. When someone comes to your website via Google, they need to know that they're in the right place immediately or they're going to hit the "Back" button and never return.

You could have well written, objectively valuable content, but if your blog posts, whitepapers and other materials aren't about the ideas that your keywords represent, that's an excellent sign that they're actually irrelevant to the needs of your visitors. It's also probably a sign that your keywords are being used in an unnatural way, which is again an efficient way to get penalized by some of the major search engines.

you're neglecting the mobile experience

Finally, every last page on your website needs to be optimized for a terrific experience on smartphones, tablets and other types of mobile devices. These days, that is how the vast majority of your visitors will actually be seeing your site the majority of the time. If your content is amazing but your site doesn't load well on an iPhone, you can rest assured that people are quickly going to head back to Google to find a well optimized site that offers what they're looking for. Do not, under any circumstances, let this happen to you.