It seems like search engine algorithms are changing as often as we change our underpants – ok maybe not that frequently, but it’s definitely hard to keep up with wouldn’t you agree?
Having an SEO expert in your corner is great for this, as it means you’ve always got one foot forward when it comes to SEO best practice. If you’re managing your own SEO strategy though, the key principles haven’t changed that much. But, it’s always worth reviewing whether you’ve been making any blunders on your website, which could be impacting your search ranking.
To ensure you stay in Google’s good books, here are 5 common on-page SEO mistakes for you to cross check against your website, so you don’t fall into the SEO penalty trap.
Keyword stuffing
If you’ve been in the game long enough you’ll know this is an old school SEO tactic! Once upon a time it was acceptable to throw in as many of your target keywords into your website content to help boost your rankings. But these days it’s considered a spammy act. Don’t think you can fool the search engines because it will only hurt your performance.
Instead of writing for the bots you should naturally integrate your target keywords into your content to ensure you’re providing a positive user experience. Google, for example, uses Latent Sematic Indexing (LSL), which can recognise the topic of your content without the need to stuff keywords everywhere.
Duplicating content
Be careful when it comes to repeating content across your site. Duplicating content in multiple places – be it different pages within your site, different sites or sub domains is not considered best practice.
For example, if you’re talking about a product on your home page and then you have a separate product page on your site, make sure you don’t use the copy verbatim, rather paraphrase what you’re trying to say so it doesn’t all sound the same.
And we don’t even need to mention ripping off someone else’s content as your own.
Keyword cannibalisation
This refers to targeting the same keywords across multiple pages on your site. Doing this can impact how well a particular page will perform. Ensuring you have clear site architecture in place will help to establish specific target keywords, for each of the pages on your site that you intend to optimise.
Focusing on quantity not quality
This is one mistake our SEO experts see all too often. The correct phrase is quality over quantity right? Creating volumes of copy on your site for the sake of it, isn’t going to make a huge difference to your rankings if its not quality content.
Yes search engines favour fresh, regular content being produced on your site, but it should be created with user intent and a purpose. Make sure your target keywords and associated keywords align with your content by naturally integrating them into your H2 tags and body content.
Optimising keywords for the wrong content
So you have the perfect keyword to target but how relevant is it to the content on your site? You may think creating content around the keyword is going to result in SEO success, but if it doesn’t seem like the right fit, search engines will pick up on this. So the best scenario is to always keep relevancy and search intent in mind when optimising keywords for content.
Get on top of these and with any luck you should start to see some improvements to your search rankings. Continuous optimisation is key and a sound SEO strategy will help you stay on track of your SEO goals.
Get your website found on Google with an effective SEO strategy developed by yours truly. Talk to us to make it happen.
