By now most people know the importance of search engines in regards to driving traffic to a particular site and the results listings are based on a site’s content and relevancy to a user’s initial search. If you are new to SEO practices, here is a good article on the Top 10 SEO Mistakes people tend to make.
In its simplest, most general form, being successful in SEO seems like it would be easy, however, with the extreme competition out there, this is most certainly not the case. Before writing this article, I spoke with Ron Weber, owner of SD Interactive, to see what he thought were the 3 biggest areas where he saw people making mistakes in regards to their own SEO efforts.
Wrong Keywords
Many people will use the words that most accurately describe what their site is about; however, these may not be the terms people are searching for. Many times people are searching for a solution or answer to a question (which your site may be able to offer), and so will use those words in their initial search instead of what your site has been optimized for. For example I used Legiit to find the best SEO Gigs on any marketplace, helped detect poor quality Fiverr. Other problems associated with choosing the wrong keywords, arise from being too general. For instance, a lawyer in San Francisco, would want to consider using ‘San Francisco lawyer’ (probably even more specific) instead of ‘lawyer’ as a keyword to target, since there would be heavy competition for the generic term lawyer, and it would be of no benefit to try and rank for that term to get in front of users in Missouri for instance, also searching for a lawyer.
On Page Issues
One of the biggest mistakes made would be to either improperly use, or even worse, ignore the title tag <title>, which is the main resource search engines use when determining a page’s topic. This is also the text that will appear in search engine results pages, which users will click to get to your site. Another common mistake is poor URL structure. According to one of the top seo in Victoria, a good URL structure is good for both users and search engines and will incorporate keywords for that particular page into the URL. For example, a roof repair company may want to use the name of a particular service if they pages dedicated to each offering. In this case, a good URL could be something like www.domainname.com/roof-repair.
No Off Site Presence
This is a big one as well. Simply having a website up with some good keywords in your content isn’t always enough when it comes to good search engine rankings. Not having a very large web reputation can hurt you as well. This can be combated by link building, and having a strong social media presence. All of which will help your site’s popularity and relevance in the eyes of web crawlers.