6 FREQUENT SEO MISTAKES TO ABSOLUTELY AVOID!

 SEO Mistakes: The List of SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid!

SEO is a subtle preparation. A single deviation can seriously impact the position of your web pages! To avoid them, learn to spot these 6 (too) common SEO mistakes.

Through ignorance or clumsiness, you constellate your SEO strategy with many errors. Some are tiny and others are major; some have only a limited impact, others can seriously affect the positioning of your web pages. And sometimes, a tiny oversight can have serious consequences, or even lead to your site being banned from search engine results. Learn how to spot these 6 common SEO mistakes to better eradicate them!

SEO mistake # 1: you haven't edited your robots.txt file

Cities have their signposts, websites have their robots.txt file. Magical, this one tells search engine robots which files and pages of your website they are supposed to crawl, and which are closed to traffic.

The SEO mistake here is not optimizing this file, that is, leaving it as is. By default, it allows robots to visit all the pages of your website. And that is a terrible idea.

For a site of ten or twenty pages, this is not critical. Robots do their job quickly. Now, imagine that your site is 10,000 pages long: robots may be computer programs, but they still have limits. And they like to be cuddled. If you let them crawl all of your pages and files, they might come back to you less often and get married with other sites. The ideal is therefore to configure your robots.txt to exclude anything that does not interest robots (temporary directories, pages under construction, etc.). And avoid reproducing SEO errors of this type!

SEO mistake # 2: you created lots of duplicate content (even without doing it on purpose)

There are two types of duplicate content: voluntary copying of content and the stated intention to copy and paste. Consequently, there are two common SEO errors in this area:

You need to write a description of your business and post it on several media: website home page, professional social profiles, job boards, etc. The problem is, it takes time to write the same thing over and over again. To gain some, you therefore knowingly duplicated the home page to display it everywhere. And in doing so, you started a sparkling fire telling Google that you are trying to rip off their bots!

You ask your employees to write content to publish on your professional blog. And you realize, after a while, that your site has been downgraded. Because some of your staff have said to themselves that it is better to pick up pieces of content here and there rather than bother to make it original.

The effect is the same in both cases: Google favors the oldest and / or highest ranking content. So you have little chance of not paying dearly for this SEO error.

SEO mistake # 3: asking search engines not to index your website

This is a stupid SEO mistake, made possible by a point of detail in your CMS (content management system), which however can have major consequences on your natural referencing ... Because this option, if it is activated, has for the effect of making your website say: "No thanks, robot friends, I don't want to be indexed so as not to appear in the search engine results!" ". In WordPress, for example, you'll find it in the "Settings" tab of the dashboard, then "Reading." This is a checkbox:

WordPress Visibility error

So, yes, it is specified that "some search engines may decide to index it anyway". But frankly, is it in your interest to take that risk?

Fortunately, this is also one of the easiest SEO mistakes to fix if something goes wrong. If, by pure chance or for want of having read your Settings page well enough, you have checked the wrong box, you will just have to uncheck it. That simple. And believe us: you will NEVER do it again.

SEO mistake # 4: you are not using html tags

Optimizing web pages for SEO is already a lot of work. So if, in addition, you have to start using those damn html tags ...

Drop the Hn tags? This is the worst idea that can come to your mind. And if you think that this gap is not really one of the biggest SEO mistakes, then you are seriously wrong. Because without these tags to structure your content, you risk losing on two levels: because you will not be able to optimize your pages with relevant keywords that target your prospects; and because search engine bots will have a hard time indexing those pages they can't understand (and trust us, they won't go to extra lengths to get there).

SEO mistake # 5: you left your external links in DoFollow

Some SEO mistakes are made with good intention - but, as we know, Google Hell is paved with those good intentions. Among these is this habit (which may be yours) of gently leaving external links to your content in DoFollow mode. Which sounds like a fatal Windows error in SEO.

Why is this a blunder? Because DoFollow links share the SEO juice by sending search engine bots to follow said links. This is very useful when it comes to linking to your pages from third party sites (it's called linkbuilding and it's one of the most popular SEO methods). But when you leave your own external links in DoFollow, it's like pointing the finger at the referring site and advising bots to give it some of your precious juice.

The solution is to switch your external links to NoFollow and focus on your internal networking. Spiders will skip links without using them and stay on your site while they index all of your pages. Much better without this SEO error, right?

SEO mistake n ° 6: you buy backlinks to promote your netlinking ...

We know: everything can be bought, everything is sold, even the improbable. This is the case with backlinks, which can be purchased at cost - different offers exist on the web. So, will you be tempt. Just once. This is good for your Ranking, Google will love you even more, and then who will know? And bam: the SEO blunder.

Some SEO mistakes, it is true, are more tempting than others. A few hundred quality backlinks in your pocketbook, that could boost the positioning of your web pages, especially in a highly competitive sector.

Except that this is typically the wrong idea. The backlinks obtained through this are generally of poor quality and the massive ordering is sanctioned by Google anyway. If 300 links appear overnight, the engine will look askance at you; and even if they appear little by little, from the moment these links are essentially toxic (badly reputable domains, off-topic sites given your theme, over-optimized anchors on the same keywords, majority of forums and directories ...), it is almost guaranteed sanction - enough to make you want to practice SEO errors. Even if you had nothing to do with it and it's entirely the SEO agency's (or Growth Hacker's) fault that made you think bladders are lanterns.

In conclusion,

Whether these SEO mistakes are your fault or unwittingly occur in your SEO strategy, the deleterious effects will be the same: you will see your positions drop in the search engines and suffer penalties that will be difficult to escape. The best is still not to fall into it. And to hunt down these frequent SEO blunders!