With the advent of internet marketing took a completely new turn. For businesses marketing became a new field where they had to learn new tricks and methods to compete with their competitors. It would not be wrong to say that businesses that learned online marketing faster became more successful than businesses that didn’t. Everything that used to be on papers, newspapers, billboards, flexes, etc. has now shifted to the internet. You now have online banner ads that act like billboards. You have affiliate programs that work like referrals and websites are much better than newspaper ads.
If you want to make your business an international entity you could not rely on throwing pamphlets in people’s homes or handing handbills over. You use online social media for that purpose. In most cases, you don’t even have to spend any money to market your business, product or service. Most of the time is spent on improving your image and reputation. In all of this, SEO serves as the blood and fuel of all online marketing because search engines results are the places where the money lies. SEO has evolved greatly in last 5 years and Google must be given credit for that.
Google has been updating its algorithms with some strict rules and keeping SEO professionals on their toes. Panda, Hummingbird, and Penguin are all the different names given to updates done in the search algorithms by Google. This made SEO serious business and while doing it properly could bring you to the top search engine results, any clumsy actions could have you catapulted out of the search engine results. If you are an aspiring search engine optimization professional, a company looking for a sound SEO strategy or a business currently deploying SEO strategies in its only marketing, here are the 7 deadly mistakes to avoid.
1. Not Mastering The Keywords
Knowing your business-related keywords is one thing and mastering them is another. You must master the art of keywords and keyword usage to make the most of your business related keywords. Instead of working on all keywords that closely or remotely related to your business, you must know the keywords that have been most lucrative for your business. Working on productive keywords will bring better results. Plowing barren lands, i.e. unproductive keywords will only add to your costs. Master the keywords or simply hire the masters of keywords for the job.
2. Focusing On Quantity Of Backlinks
There are only very rare occasions in our lives when quantity outdoes quality. In the case of backlinks, you couldn’t be any more wrong if you are focusing too much on the quantity of backlinks. Of course, how many links there are on the web that point to your website is important but Google goes a layer deeper and finds out what the quality of these links is. If you have too many backlinks coming from low-quality websites and irrelevant pages, get ready for punishment. Go for fewer but high-quality keywords.
3. Making Website Hard To Index
It is the content of your website that search engines crawlers look into in order to index your website to present it in search results. If your website can’t be indexed properly you will struggle to ascend in search results. Putting too many images with alt tags and captions is a big mistake. Don’t put your business’ name or address on pictures because they don’t get indexed. Flash animations are great to look at but indexing them is difficult for search engine spiders. Lastly, JavaScript is another thing you might want to avoid as much as you can.
4. Duplicate Content On The Website
You worked hard to put an online e-commerce website. People were telling you that you couldn’t do it but you did it. You finally have a website up and there are a lot of products hosted on it. You are busy uploading products and their pictures and doing other important things and your focus on content is zero. What you do is you copy the content from on product and paste it on all similar products. This is duplicate content. This is going to send some really bad signals to the search engines.
5. Not Structuring Website Properly
Has it happened to you at any point in time that you watched a great movie with great acting, dialogues, and material but you thought that it could have been made better or some scenes were unnecessary? This is the same with your website. How your website is structured is extremely important for your SEO strategies. Manish Bhalla, the CEO of Web Design Development Company FATbit Technologies, says “The structure of your website should be extremely smooth and spiders from search engines should be able to move from one page to another and the pages deep in the layers of your website easily. Internal linking should also be top notch”. Don’t forget the site map.
6. Forgetting Mobile Users
Even though we continue to read articles and news about how smartphones have beaten desktop computers to a pulp and how the most lucrative internet population is shifting to mobile devices, we tend to forget them when we create websites. You CAN’T forget that recently there was an update from Google that was named as a mobile addon. This particular update was particularly focused on mobile users. If you are making a website for computers and not one for mobiles, forget about any mercy from Google.
7. Not Going Social
If you are still a businessman who thinks that social networking websites aren’t meant for your business, you need a big renovation of your thoughts. Social media is either a friend or enemy of businesses today. It has the power to take your business to new heights and make it an international entity within months or bring you down on the ground within a week. Share your stuff online. Be creative with your content. Share your business related content, not as business content but stuff that would make the masses smile and talk about your content. Let them talk about your content and how interesting it was – your business’ acknowledgment is a subtle, invisible and yet effective part of it.