The face of SEO has changed, and time will tell if it’s for the better. Now it’s extremely difficult for a site to rank on the first page for moderately competitive keywords. The days of blasting the web with your backlinks in order to rank are long gone. In some ways this has leveled the playing field, but it means that webmasters must be extremely cautious with their SEO strategies.
SEO is still very effective, even after all it’s been through. You’ll need to throw out your old strategies and implement some new ones in keeping with Google policies. If you want your site on top, take note of, and avoid these top 5 SEO mistakes.
Over Optimization
High keyword density, no diversity in anchor text, tags and titles loaded with keywords, and basically an anything goes approach to SEO got websites to the first page of Google a year or two ago. Use these strategies today, and you’ll be committing business suicide. Over optimization is one technique that you need to quit right now because it will sabotage your rankings and increase the possibility of your site being removed from the search engines. Keep your keyword density below 1% and write for your readers, not for search engines.
Poor Anchor Text Diversification
In spite of all the penalties, some misinformed SEOs are still making the mistake of using the same keywords, over and over, in their anchor texts. This may have worked in the past, but Google would have sent out warnings of unnatural links to site owners who employed this strategy.
Limit your main keywords in the anchor text links to 5-10% and the rest of links should be composed of some other variations in your keywords and naked links. This way your link building will look more natural to the search engines. You don’t want to give Google any reason to flag your website.
High Link Velocity
Building links too fast has always been a problem, but now it is even more crucial that you don’t. Slow and steady wins the race in 2013, so forget about blasting the web with thousands of links all at once. Focus instead on obtaining backlinks from high quality sites that are relevant to yours. Link building is a never ending process, so continue to build links if you want to stay on top.
Failing To Deep Link
Your link building will appear unnatural if all your links point to the homepage only. You need to also build links to your inner pages. In fact your inner pages might be even more important than the homepage when it comes to link building. Make sure that your backlinks are evenly distributed to all the pages on your site.
Focusing Only On Links
In 2013 you need to relax your focus on backlinks, and pay some attention to the content on your web properties. Blog posts, videos, social media updates, and images, are just and some ways to use content to your advantage. Set up your blog to incorporate Google authorship since that is the way of the future. Authorship helps with accountability because you won’t want to associate with crappy content.
Conclusion
With proper planning and a little bit of luck, you will be able to get to the top of the search engines for difficult keywords. Follow the rules and avoid these mistakes, and there’ll be no stopping your success in 2013.