05 Aug The Top 10 SEO Mistakes – Part 1
Today’s video – “The Top Ten SEO Sins.” Kind of feel that I should be getting the whip out and start flailing myself, because these are the things that we do wrong, sometimes without even realizing it, and look, this is just going to be a quick video.
I have no doubt, no hesitation in saying that I’m not here to take up your lunchtime. I just want to be able to show you some ideas and some things that you can take home with you today and put into action. So first things first, I need you to grab a pen and paper because I’m not giving you notes for this. You’re taking them yourself. I want you to go and check these things on your own website. Go and have a look.
Find out if they apply to you or maybe to your client’s websites, if you’re in the web development field. These are the top ten most common things that we mess up, that we do wrong, taken from a number of different surveys and a number of different opinions online, and these are, what I like to say the expert opinions; the problems that we see time and time again.
So number one is this – keyword stuffing. Can you believe it, people still actually do this? I’m not necessarily referring to the image of what’s in white there and that is you know trying to hide keywords by putting them on the page and making them the same color as the background. I mean, that kind of thing went out with the dodo. I mean, that kind of thing was never in, in the first place, but people still did it, like ten or more years ago.
What I’m talking about I guess is, really making sure that the keyword that you want to be targeting for this particular page is on your page and it’s on your page, and it’s on your page. It’s in the meta-title. It’s in the description. It’s in the meta-keywords. It’s in the H1, and it’s another H1, and then another H1. Then we’re using it in bold-facing. Then we’re using it in our text, and then we’re using it in our images and we’re just using the freaking thing everywhere.
Here’s the thing. We actually do need to use it everywhere, but just lightly once or twice everywhere, if that makes sense. It’s not something that you need to have all over the place, again and again and again. Too many people are still adhering to age-old archaic, dinosaur principles. Now if you’re building new sites and if you’re in the game, then well perhaps not, but here’s the thing. If you’re say a small business owner and your website hasn’t been updated for a number of years, very possible, you could have some of these things on your website without even being aware of it.
Because it was built eons ago, by someone you don’t even have contact with anymore, and it’s never been updated since, so you need to go and check that out. Now I should also say that I want to keep these videos quite short, perhaps around five minutes each and we’ll make this a short series for this top ten, so you can look at some now and then the others during your next coffee break and so on.
Moving right along, broken links, now this refers to broken links on your website. You know, you click the link, bang you go somewhere? Hello, it’s not there anymore. It’s a 404 error. Just quickly on that, I hope you have a good 404 error page on your website, which helps people find where they need to go. More importantly, I hope you’re getting some kind of error reporting, so that you know when broken links come up and where they are.
When you have a link from one page in your site to another, and as your site grows over time, yes, some of these end up being broken links, links that don’t work. No problem. But what you really want to do is go and fix them, because you could be losing business along the way. That’s just the pure, simple truth of it. There are many ways to find them.
I like using Google’s Webmaster Tools, because it lets me know what kind of problems I have on my site, and webpages that it can no longer find; great little tool, great little tip. You need to get in there and make sure that you don’t have any broken links on your website. And if the page that they’re going to is no longer there, then at least set up either a redirect to another page, or of course, you could just create that page again, if it’s generating traffic.
Don’t make these SEO Mistakes!
Number three, plagiarism in its most essential form, taking other people’s work and pretending it’s yours. We don’t do that, do we? Well, maybe you don’t, but I can tell you now a bucket load of people out there actually do. There are still many people who do this. It’s astounding to see how many people still do this. I’m not talking about using somebody else’s content and putting it on your website, with a good link back to them, although mind you, you should certainly ask before you do that.
They may not want a link from your website back to theirs. So you need to ask and get their permission, okay very, very important. Never, never, never when you’re writing content, copy and paste other people’s works, not even a paragraph or two, none at all. I’ve seen people do this. This is a foolish mistake and you will be penalized for it. Not only as far as search engine marketing goes you might get smacked, as far as the legal side of it goes as well, so please, don’t do that. All right, let’s take a quick break. We’ll come back with the next video in the next series. Click that link to find out now, how to watch the second in this little series.
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