Spending time and money on digital engagement and online marketing is necessary for any business in the 21st century. To help ensure that your money is being well-utilized, it is important that you at least have a basic understanding of how online content works and how you can ensure that your marketing efforts actually reach the right audience. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a powerful way to enhance your efforts. With that in mind, here are 4 of the most common mistakes to look out for in your SEO plan.
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Keywords Over Content
Keywords are a very important part of your SEO strategy, but they are not the only consideration. Search algorithms have become much more advanced than they ever have been before, and just because a keyword appears often enough does not mean that the page will rank highly. Instead, these algorithms look for an overall theme to the page.
For example, a restaurant in New York shouldn’t just focus on the keyword “New York restaurant.” The pages should also contain phrases like: dining experience, eating out, expert chefs, best hamburger, etc. These words all lead the search engine to relate the page to a restaurant.
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Focusing On Links
Link-building is important, but quality of content and quality of links are both more important. Put differently, if you have links coming in from poorly-designed and poorly-ranked websites, it is not going to help very much. Similarly, if people are linking to your sub-standard content, don’t expect it to help out very much.
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Building Lots of Pages
Having more pages on your website can certainly be helpful, but if you do not pay attention to the quality of your content first, then you might just be wasting time. Notice a trend here? Quality of content always comes before anything else!
The truth is, building pages is helpful to increase ranking, but some pages are not even indexed, which means they do not affect your search position at all. If you can build plenty of quality pages, go ahead. If you’re just adding pages for SEO purposes, you may want to reconsider.
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Using the “Computer Guy”
While your tech person may be quite skilled in a variety of technical aspects, online marketing is a completely different ballgame. It is essential that you understand there is a different approach required for proper digital engagement than for your other technical needs. With this in mind, it is important that you hire a professional SEO company rather than simply try to use someone in house.
If you can avoid these 4 major mistakes, you can be certain that you are better equipped to deal with the current SEO marketplace. This will ensure you a better ranking on search engines, and ultimately lead to more website traffic.
