It’s as if B2B marketers were bewitched by the supposed promise and potential of SEO that they tend to believe in it unwaveringly despite the challenges or rapid changes in trends and algorithms. They’ve been doing it for a long time, yet, the same mistakes are repeated endlessly, most of which are not even hard to detect and repair.
These issues must be given proper attention, as they would cripple the very foundation of SEO, eventually affecting the lead generation hopes of a business, not to mention its reputation amongst other online marketers. These are 6 erroneous habits every SEO marketer must avoid:
Duplicate content – In SEO, when you have two similar content pieces appearing in more than one webpage or URL within a website, you have duplicate content. For example, your business homepage may be reached through the URL http://www.business.com/index.html or http://www.business.com/home. The problem is that Google will not be able to decide which content to index, so eventually this web page will not appear in search results. This also happens to other pages of a website, and to resolve this, marketers need to consolidate similar pages, delete redundant content, or redirect the duplicate ones to the original page.
Not optimizing tags – We see a lot of sites tagging their titles with generic words like “home” or “default” or their brand names. Marketers tend to forget that title tags are important SEO elements that should be part of on-page optimization. It helps in attaining good ranking on Google, and it also lets other people see the tags in the SERP whenever they see the results.
404 errors – These errors tell a lot of things about your site quality, especially when people stumble upon good external links only to end up in a 404 error page.
Your site is un-crawlable – If search engines can’t crawl to your content (or if you just forgot to link to it), your SEO will be in peril. Perform a spot-check: if you have thousands of sitemap pages and Google only indexed 20 pages, chances are your site is not crawl-friendly. You can also use other tools like Screaming Frog or the “site:” command in Google.
Unrealistic SEO goals – You can’t just aim for good SEO results if your design is crappy, your content is boring or your marketing team is sloppy. First things first – you need to fix the basic flaws before you dream of something bigger.
Not keeping up – Those who have failed in SEO are usually the ones who refused to let go of their old ways and not look at current trends in the business. It’s not to say that “new” is always better, but if there’s something out there that could make your business better, is it not worth a look?
This content originally appeared at Modern SEO Marketing: The “Must-Not-Do” list