4 SEO Mistakes that Could Kill Your Campaign

While SEO isn’t a particularly complicated process, it is possible to misstep here and there, especially if you are new to the game. Most website owners make SEO mistakes without even realizing they did anything wrong. Here are 4 common SEO mistakes that you want to be sure you aren’t guilty of:

1. Targeting keywords that don’t reflect user intent.
What’s the difference between gym shoes, running shoes and tennis shoes? Some visitors might use the three interchangeably, while a serious runner or tennis player is looking for a very certain kind of shoe. You want to make sure your site targets the right keywords for your audience and their intent. While driving more traffic is great, it doesn’t matter if it’s the wrong kind of traffic. The keywords you choose will determine who finds and visits your website. You want to make sure it’s the right person. Think like your audience when it comes to keyword research.

2. Writing your website content for the search engines and not human readers.
This is one of the most common SEO mistakes I see site owners make. It’s great that they are so gung-ho about SEO, but you have to remember that the search engines are not the ones that are going to be doing business with your website—human visitors are. While it’s important to optimize a website for SEO, you don’t want to over-do for the sake of making your site look “better” to the search engines. In fact, Google recently announced an over optimization penalty for sites that pushed it too far. You want good SEO, but not at the expense of the user experience.

3. Building you website entirely in Flash.
The search spiders can’t read anything that is built in Flash, so if you whole site was designed that way all the search engines see is a blank page. While incorporating multi-media elements like images and videos is great for the user experience, the search engines need to be able to “see” your website in order to properly index it. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you add image tags and make sure your branded logos are visible to the search spiders. If the search engines can’t see your site they can’t publish it in the SERPs, meaning you’ll never get the non-branded visitor growth that is essential to SEO success.

4. Getting overly aggressive with your link building.
The search engines likes to see a natural and diversified approach to link building because it shows that you are committed to white hat link building. The search engines know that it takes a long time for a website to build a strong portfolio of natural links, so if you website goes from 100 to 10,000 links in a short amount of time, that throws up a red flag that you might have used black hat link building tactics in order to artificially boost the number of inbound links in your link portfolio. Even if all the links are pretty good, you don’t want to give the search engines any reason to doubt your site’s trust factor. Great links will come with time, and quality is more important than quantity. Link building is one of those never ending SEO processes, and there is no quick way to “win” at it.