14 Common SEO Mistakes & Errors

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the very effective way to drive natural and targeted traffic from search engines to our websites. Recently SEOMoz has published 12 common SEO mistakes and errors made by newcomers. It is always great to learn from mistakes and experience. I would like to take this opportunity to share with all of you the common seo errors so that we can something and not making same mistake in the future.

Here are the summary list of 12 common SEO mistakes and errors which all of us should not do it.

#1 Repetitive Keyword Targeting

When you are targeting a keyword or key phrase, it is good have it appeared in title tag, H1 tag and content. But it is not necessary to have shown in every page of your website.

#2 Splitting Efforts Across Many Domains

If you have register 500 domains under a single web server and trying to link all of them back to your main domain, please stop doing it. Google prefers links from different IP address you should focus on getting quality links.

#3 Reciprocal Linking

If you are creating a link list page which is used for link trading with other websites, then this kind of reciprocal links should be avoided. But if you are linking to an authority site and somehow that site also links back to your website, then this is the reciprocal linking we can have.

#4 Keyword Stuffing

As I mentioned in one of my previous blog post, keyword stuffing is some king of spamming technique which is outdated and can be easily detected by search engines.

#5 Blocking Bots Access to Duplicate Content

It is certainly not a good idea to block search engine crawlers to access duplicated content. The better way is to use 301 redirect or new canonical tag released by Google.

#6 Avoiding XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps is very helpful to guide search engines what are the content in your website. If you do not have it implemented, you should do it immediately.

#7 Blocking Bots Rather than Using Nofollow

Again, blocking search engine bots is a bad way if you do not want to give link juice to your destination page of the link. Instead you should use nofollow link attribute.

#8 Paranoia About Registering with Google Webmaster Tools

There is nothing to afraid to register your website with Google’s Webmaster Tools. In fact, you can have insights exception report when Google crawler access your web pages.

#9 Ignoring Non-Google Search Engines

Although Google is the biggest player in the search engine industry, you should not ignore other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN Live. The truth is it is easier to rank better in those search engines and it can drive you significant traffic.

#10 Using Google’s Link Command

The result of Google’s link command only represents part of what Google knows. To certain extent, it can be considered as accurate enough to give you a rough idea of how popular is your web page or website. You should not too depend on the result returned.

#11 Submitting Articles for Links

By submitting articles to directories and article repositories, you gain valuable backlinks. But you should avoid submitting same article to multiple website as this is considered duplicated content.

#12 Chasing DoFollow Blogs

Although dollow blogs do give you inbound links when you make comments. You no need to just concentrate on this strategy as they are many other ways to gain backlinks.

In addition, I have 2 SEO mistakes worth to mention.

#13 Internal Linking

While chasing for backlinks or inbound links, many people forget to do internal linking. Internal linking is also an important factor during the search engine ranking evaluation. If you have enough internal links, you can rank higher in search engine results even you have less inbound links compared to your competitors.

I have 2 blog posts discussing about the importance and practical technique of internal linking which you might be interested to read more.

1. High Google Ranking With Internal Linking
2. 2 Practical Internal Linking Techniques

#14 Consistency

To achieve high rankings in search engine is not 1 or 2 days job. You need to be consistent over a long period of time. It takes time for you to build backlinks and watching your search engine rankings climbing from day to day. It is not going to happen overnight. In addition, you should update your SEO knowledge regularly as search engines keep on improving and changing rules.

Conclusion

Nobody is perfect. As long as you are willing to learn from the SEO mistakes and errors, you should be able to get high rankings in search engine result pages. Let’s learn together to achieve our goals.

Related Posts:

1. One Way Links vs Reciprocal Links vs Three Way Links
2. 2 Practical Internal Linking Techniques
3. 3 Common Off-Page Over Optimizations
4. 5 Inbound Link Tips For High Search Engine Rankings
5. High Google Ranking With Internal Linking