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Common SEO mistakes to avoid

If you’ve decided your website is in need of an SEO strategy, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve outlined a few common SEO mistakes to help you avoid causing more harm than good to your website’s rankings.

Poor title tags and meta descriptions

Unique and engaging titles and meta descriptions are vitally important when it comes to SEO. Search engines still reply on the title tag to inform them of the content the page contains. Mate descriptions should be as close to 160 characters as possible, but not over, and should be unique and persuasive. Each page should have a meta description, including each new blog post and they should include relevant keywords where appropriate.

Not enough content

Ideally, each page on your website should have at least 500 words of content. However, this content needs to be relevant, useful and of high quality. If you don’t have enough high quality content, search engines will consider it a poor site overall. You should also ensure you don’t have too many similar pages as Google does not reward duplicate content.

Not mobile friendly

With so many people now using browsing the internet on their mobile phones, your website should be responsive. Google’s Mobile First switchover is happening in the near future, and any sites that are not responsive will suffer. You should fist look at how much of your traffic comes from mobiles and how much comes from desktops.

Not focusing on conversions

While it is very important to rank highly for your keywords to improve traffic to your website, you also need to be focusing on conversions. You can use sites such as Kissmetrics to see the conversions for your keywords and use this information to better optimise your site. This way, you will know which keywords are worth your time and effort.

Intrusive ads

A lot of sites are, understandably, supported by adverts, however, problems begin to arise when these adverts interfere with the user’s experience. Google will penalise these sites, causing you to rank lower. Google focuses on optimising user experience and does not want to send users of the search engine to sites that affect their experience.

Not using anchor text

Using anchor text for internal links is vitally important for SEO and too many sites are wasting this opportunity. Writing “click here” instead of using relevant keywords is a waste. For example, if you are linking to your services page, you could use the anchor text “website design services”.

Focusing on quantity not quality

Link building is one very successful way of improving your websites SEO. However, one link from a popular and well regarded blog will improve your search engine rankings far more than hundreds of low quality links from spammy websites. Make sure the links back to your site are coming from high quality sites that are relevant to your website.

For more expert SEO advice, contact the team at Webahead.

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