Check out these common mistakes while doing SEO and know how to avoid them

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – What it is exactly?

If your website is going to be your office, then the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will the employees in your office. Employees are always the backbone of any company. Likewise, SEO is a backbone of a well-constructed website. Search Engine Optimization is a process in which you make your website rank top in the search engine results page (SERP). A bad SEO technique or workflow probably results in decreasing your overall page rank and the reputation your page created.

SEO mistakes will result bad on your branding. The most common mistakes that every SEO executive makes are as follows

  • Content duplication that might result in confusing the search engine bots
  • Lack of sitemap makes crawling difficult
  • Site not being mobile optimized
  • Meta content duplication will result in bad reputation
  • Keyword density and broken link

Duplicate content

One of the most common mistakes is content duplication. This is because, it exists without knowing whether it is a mistake. These content are identical to each other and are placed on the different pages. Search engine bots often confuse with these types of content when a query is put on the relevant keyword. Bots baffle to decide which page is relevant to the user’s query. This might result in the page rank reputation of the website. You can avoid these issues by using canonical URLs or by 301 redirects.

How to avoid: To check and identify the duplicate content in your website, you can use the free tool called “Duplicate content checker”. It allows you find all the duplicate content in your website.

Sitemap lacking

An XML sitemap is like an employee’s identity card. Identity card helps in identifying the person likewise XML sitemap help the search engine bots to crawls your entire website and also to index your webpages. Sitemap results in higher page rank and also a clear indexing of the individual pages.

How to avoid: Check whether you have a sitemap (domainname/sitemap.xml). If not, create a sitemap.xml and submit it to Google Webmaster Tool (Crawl -> Sitemap).

Site not being mobile optimised

In recent time, most of the searches are done through mobile searches. So, a couple of months back Google launched an algorithm called a Google’s Mobile Friendly Algorithm. This algorithm concentrates only on site which are responsive and mobile friendly. Sites which are not responsive are like to threw out of the Search Engine Page Rank (SERP).

How to avoid: Google Webmaster Tool has a feature called Mobile Usability that clearly states the issues faced by your website when launched on any mobile device. Using this tool, the mobile friendliness of a website can be easily stated.

Duplicate meta tags and not-optimized meta content

After the Google’s recent Panda upgrade, duplicate meta tags are sure to be blacklisted. This is one of the most and very common mistakes that happens often. Meta content i.e. the meta title and meta description helps the user to have a preview of the page content (kind of sample content). Many sites have unclear meta titles and even empty meta description. Title tags help in higher page ranking in SERP and the same for meta description.

How to avoid: To identify duplicate meta tags and meta contents, use the HTML improvements option available in Search appearance of the Google Webmaster Tool.

Keyword density and broken link

Every content’s keywords should have only a density between 1 to 4 percentage. Google doesn’t concentrate more on keyword density which means you should be away from the boundary. Avoid broken links since Google consider broken links as lack of interest.

How to avoid: Check you keyword density with the help of webconfs.com and the broken links with drlinkcheck.com. Once found you can improve accordingly.

  • Posted in SEO