Sometimes things fall down to you the owner to handle your own search engine optimization. When it comes to doing an SEO for yourself there are certain things you need to be aware of. Skipping them could jeopardize your efforts and prevent you from achieving the desired SEO results. So we have put down a simple to follow list of top 5 SEO pitfalls that every website owner should know and avoid.
Duplicate Content
It’s been said many times before and I’ll say it again, avoid duplicate content at all costs. Google doesn’t like it, your visitors don’t like it, and so why do it? Make sure that your content is unique on per-page basis and it’s not repetitive. This applies to your website content, page title tags, meta descriptions, and even your page URLs.
Unique Content
When you are writing or editing your websites content, making it unique and interesting enough to engage your visitors will help you increase your performance. Visitors will stay on your website longer, share your website and reference it on other websites, helping you with your overall optimization process. Good engaging unique content is the key to providing visitors the right information and helping you with overall website conversion ratio.
Over Optimized
Sometimes newcomers to the SEO game can get a little carried away and over complicate and over optimize their pages. For example, in a linking strategy, you don’t want to have all of your back-links have the same anchor text. Instead, you want to diversify and have a variety in your linking strategy. Same goes for your on page optimization where stuffing keywords with every possible sentence just doesn’t make sense and will not help you achieve better results.
Same Keywords
You spend a lot of time working on your unique content, but failing to do proper keyword research and using same keywords on multiple pages can ruin your page’s relevance. It’s always best to do your keyword research first and select up to three keywords per page for best optimization.
301 Redirects
When updating your website you often tend to move some pages around or rename them. Especially when implementing the friendly SEO URLs, many users forget to create a 301 redirect for the previous old pages. Do not forget to create a 301 redirect for any changed pages. If you are reading this and going “well what is a 301 redirect” then perhaps you should take a step back and go back to SEO 101 basics.