Content marketing has evolved significantly over the last two decades. Also, due to the constant changes in Google algorithms and the huge flood of wrong information that exists in the field of Internet marketing, it is obvious that many of us will suffer SEO mistakes in SEO processes and content marketing strategies.
There is always the possibility of mistakes in the field of SEO for any business. These mistakes can be inadvertent or due to the frequent inattention of webmasters. If you become aware of these events and mistakes and manage them with your knowledge and experience, there is no need to worry. But anyway, to get these experiences, you have to deal with many things. Especially those who have started their new business and have no previous experience in this field are highly at risk of making these mistakes.
Usually, these mistakes happen just when new business owners think they’re on the right track. If they optimize their site and content without paying attention to the important points mentioned here. If you take these things seriously and pay enough attention to them, you can easily avoid these mistakes and be seen prominently in search engines.
Every time new algorithms are updated and changes are made in search engines, our obsession to keep up with SEO increases, and we are forced to focus on the new changes in order not to get into trouble.
Most webmasters know the most important principles of SEO well, but why can’t they use this information and tools properly? In the following, we point out the SEO mistakes that webmasters easily make in this field.
The most common SEO mistakes
In the following, a number of SEO mistakes that webmasters often make will be explained to you.
Unoptimized keyword structure
Despite the increase in the semantic search of users and also the increase in machine learning technology, research and research on the keyword should take precedence over other things. All the content of your content should be schematically related to the overall goals of your business through topics and keywords.
If our content covers our main topics, but the keywords are missing, how can we know what exactly users are looking for? Without keyword research, how can you really find your audience and understand who you are writing your content for?
Keywords actually act as a bridge between the user’s goals and the informational content you publish. Keyword-optimized content will help position web pages to rank better naturally (organically) in search engines and will influence targeted searches. This effectively makes your blog content stand out.
For blogs that are created on websites, the main focus should be on long phrases and keywords. Using words like how, where, why, etc. in question phrases are common examples of this.
The use of phrases that are more interesting in the majority of users, such as words such as “training”, “how to use” and similar items are other ideas for choosing keywords that many webmasters do not pay enough attention to.
Webmasters also often make mistakes in optimizing headers, meta tags and targeted content with phrases or keywords, and this is one of the most common SEO mistakes they make. Keep in mind that specific keywords are usually displayed in bold in meta descriptions in search engine search results. This issue can lead to an increase in the click rate of your website content.
Keyword research doesn’t end with optimizing the header structure of your site (which includes the title, meta description, etc.). Many bloggers are unable to use semantic SEO properly. Semantic SEO or Semantic SEO allows bloggers to create more readable content and thus get more impact from key phrases or answer more user requests and questions and turn their content into special content. do
But on the other hand, if something is optimized too much, it may cross the red line of danger and create unfavorable conditions. Creating a high concentration of keywords can turn your article from a comprehensive and useful article into a spam article! Too much keyword usage can also reduce the readability of your content text and thus lead to less user interest.
In order to stay away from complexities and better understand the border between correct and incorrect usage, it is suggested to benefit from the best SEO patterns in an integrated manner. For example, if you intend to optimize your site’s SEO, you must examine all elements, including meta tags and URLs. Apart from sending signals to search engines, keywords play an important role in the internal engineering of your site.
Not choosing keywords with low competition.
Although it is always recommended to work on important and hot keywords due to the high number of users and contacts, it would be a mistake to focus all your attention on these words. This problem is one of the biggest mistakes of newly established businesses. Whereas if you put some of your activity on low-competition keywords, you will greatly increase your chances of being seen by a large group of users.
In this way, you can get a large share of the first page results of search engines in this keyword model without entering into tough competition with other powerful businesses. It is even recommended that you spend most of your time creating and publishing content with low-competition keywords to begin with. Then, after you have established yourself in the search engines for a while, you can enter the next phase and compete for highly competitive keywords.
Unconventional use of keywords (Keyword Stuffing)
Keyword Stuffing or the unconventional use of keywords, is an old technique in the topic of SEO, by which webmasters could place a page or content of their website in an unusual way in the initial results of search engines. The working method of this technique is simple. Excessive use of a keyword in a text and increasing the density of its number in order to be placed in search engine results is known by this name.
This technique is actually a way to bypass the artificial intelligence of search engines that was used between 2003 and 2007. In 2003, Google partially stopped this cheating method by updating the Google Florida algorithm. Then an update in 2011 for Google Panda and in 2013 for Google Hummingbird completely eradicated the issue. Keyword stuffing doesn’t affect a website’s ranking these days, but using this method still involves heavy search engine penalties. Because this case is not only a spamming move, but also a violation of common laws.
Google identifies websites that have used this method with the help of its updated algorithms and fines them. The results show that even many websites have been completely removed from Google’s index pages for using this technique. Many new webmasters do not understand this and think that the more keywords they use in the text, the better. If you do not pay attention to this issue, you can easily jeopardize the future of your website.
Publication of poor and low-quality pages
We have said many times before in the topic of digital marketing that you should try to optimize your content for the users and readers of your website first, not for search engines. Write your content light and simple and don’t try to show off with heavy and complicated terms.
In most cases, the content on the sites is not written just to publish but to create awareness and answer a need. It is suggested to use practical tips in the content to increase the value of the content.
Content marketing as a marketing tactic helps your branding. A stable article establishes the face of your brand and your voice as the author of the article will be heard by the users, and this will also make you a powerful and influential person in your field of work.
Take an overview of your website or blog. What experience does a reader (user) get when first encountering your website? Also remember that the average time users need to get attention is 8 seconds. Optimize the structure of your header and meta tags in order to facilitate the readability of the content.
Use catchy headlines to grab the audience’s attention and increase this attention with the first paragraph or so-called powerful introduction paragraph. Always use clear and concise wording that is easy for your audience to read, and use videos, images, and animated GIFs to give the user a break between paragraphs. With these actions, the time that users spend on your content will also increase.
Poor content promotion process
Probably the biggest mistake that can get bloggers into trouble and ruin small businesses is poor content delivery. It has been said many times that a good article is an article that acts like a magnet and even gets a better ranking for the website based on the quality of its writing. Many webmasters and bloggers consider strong content as long content. You may publish an article with more than 3000 words that even includes pictures, but its value is lower than an article with less than 400 words! The main criterion for the quality of content is to attract traffic and visits.
In order to achieve sufficient success in this field, you must use a suitable strategy that matches your type of activity. Content marketing strategies are vast and cannot be easily learned. First of all, you should base this strategy according to your field of activity and also use important tools and recommendations. Here are some of these recommendations:
- In your work system and the colleagues you have, make people responsible for sharing content. It is better to share a part of the text so that readers can visit your site to read the full article.
- Ask these people to share your content on social networks.
- Put quotes from famous people and thinkers of different industries in your content and share the text of these quotes from the content of your content on social networks and different channels.
- Use videos and infographics to increase the possibility of sharing by users and make your content more effective and faster.
- Give links to sites that have linked to the content of your field of activity before you.
- Register your new content on reliable sites and expose your content more than the old content of other sites.
- Order paid ads on social networks or sites related to your activity to directly attract the contacts you need.
As a content publisher, you should know which part of your content has the best feedback on social networks. Usually, the most important and vital examples of such include the following:
- Educational content that starts with “how” or “why”.
- Infographics
- Educational videos, news and…
Content can be used as a core element in marketing tactics and as a generator, launching and strengthening other elements of your business. Meanwhile, simple and aimless content will be nothing but a useless investment for you, and aimlessness in this field is one of the mistakes of SEO.
Do not forget the signals and factors of users and social networks. If you improve in social networks, the attention of thousands of users will be drawn to your content.
Lack of attention to content SEO in addition to content production
Many businesses spend a lot of money on their website content to provide exactly the information that users are looking for. Although this movement in itself is one of the most important factors for the success of a website, but when your users and contacts are not able to find your website, then all this effort will not be effective. This issue has made many businesses unable to achieve a good position.
Smaller businesses tend to put website content creation and publishing ahead of SEO strategies, thinking that they should perfect their website content first and then move on to SEO processes. But the truth is that SEO and content should go hand in hand. As a result, remember to do the same activity in both topics in order to appear in the search results of search engines in less time.
Not paying attention to the main topics of SEO.
In most cases, SEO novices do not know that SEO has two external parts (text content) and an internal part, including page titles, meta descriptions, names of files and images, alternative text (Alt Text), page addresses (URL), etc. Since the inner part is not visible in appearance, they do not pay special attention to it.
But paying attention to these items is inevitable to complete SEO processes and get a better ranking in search engines. Page Title, Page Address (URL) and Meta Description (Meta Description), which is also called Snippet, are three main and important items that are used in search engines as well as in the content shared on social networks. are displayed.
It may seem strange, but neglecting these parts is one of the biggest reasons for failure in SEO campaigns for novice webmasters. How and in what form you should complete these items requires trial and error as well as paying attention to the rules and principles of SEO standards. For example, the number of characters used in the page title and meta description should be within the standard range of 160 characters, neither less nor more. Also, page addresses should be as short and simple as possible and written only in English. Using famous SEO plugins will help you to fill out these forms correctly.
Unoptimized videos and images
When it comes to page quality, many webmasters still don’t optimize for videos and images. Photos whose format and size are not optimized lead to an increase in page loading time, which easily jeopardizes your site’s performance and success in SEO.
All original images on the site must be in jpg format. And all vectors and icons in PNG format. to be
Always use the Alt feature for images so that if your users can’t see your image in the browser for any reason, they’ll know what image they can’t see.
When you are optimizing video files, collect them all in a single folder and create a sitemap to index your videos in search engines. You should synchronize the descriptions on all your video pages in order to be indexed in a targeted way with the keyword. You can also record meta descriptions and video descriptions inside video files.
Video marketing can be done through several different channels, including your blog. According to a survey conducted by HubSpot, 43% of customers want to see more videos from content marketers on their websites.
Do not use internal links.
Success in SEO and website optimization means that once a user enters your site, you can keep him on your website. If you achieve this, you will not only get a good SEO score, but also increase the profitability of your business and brand.
Internal linking has many functions and advantages for SEO, some of which are mentioned below:
- It paves the way to guide and enter users to other pages of your website.
- It provides the position of checking and analyzing Google robots to the internal pages of the website and increases the rate of checking robots
- It optimizes your website and introduces the most important pages of your website to the Google search engine.
- Through your website, it introduces the quality and strength of links (Link Juice).
- Through the keywords used in the links, it indexes the pages linked to each other.
While backlinks are a great way to improve your search engine rankings, they can also do wonders with internal linking.
Ideally, you should include three to five internal links in each article of your blog. You can also use a drop-down menu on the main page of your website to make access to important site content easier.
Focus on search engines instead of users.
A very big mistake that many small and large businesses make is to think that they should bypass search algorithms under any circumstances in order to get a better ranking in search engines. Therefore, many webmasters start doing activities using unconventional and ineffective methods to trick search engine bots and thus get a better ranking. But as we mentioned earlier, your audience is your users, not search engine bots! Obviously, your activity should be aimed at attracting users’ attention rather than ranking in search engines.
After you have your audience’s attention, you can use regular and targeted methods to get better search engine rankings. But the interesting thing that is less noticed is that if you can attract contacts and internet users in a targeted way, you will actually draw the attention of search engines to your website activities without doing any additional work. So, it should be said that the tactics for achieving success in this field are actually almost the same for users and search engine bots.
Failure to measure the performance of SEO-related processes
SEO novices consider it their priority to focus on using different SEO methods and do not pay much attention to their results. This issue is one of these people’s other common problems and mistakes. Trying different SEO methods and strategies is a great move in itself, but it’s best to identify the best ones before trying them all together.
For this, you must implement each strategy in a certain period of time and then evaluate the performance of that method by tracking the results. For this purpose, it is suggested to use the online tools that are offered for this purpose. With the help of these tools, including the powerful Google Webmaster Tools, you can track the results related to SEO processes and see the latest changes.
Conclusion
Sites providing SEO services and successful content marketers can offer you many technical and practical tricks, but in many cases, your individual and exclusive reviews do not replace any service from any organization. So be serious about your individual or group analysis and try to boost your business by creating a successful campaign.