Common SEO Mistakes to avoid for better SEO results

It is pretty common to make mistakes and we all do it while working. In digital marketing world, a mistake could cost you a lot if you don’t fix it before it’s too late. Being a SEO Strategist myself, I learned from my mistakes and today I am going to talk about few common SEO mistakes. After going through this information, I hope you will be able to avoid all these common SEO mistakes.

Let’s start with Common SEO mistakes in On Page SEO

Title Optimization

Not optimizing title is pretty common SEO mistake for beginners. Most of the time we don’t work on the home page title tag which is very important. If you are the one who have not optimized title tag for your blog/website homepage then you need a new title tag that incorporates your business or priority keyword as well as your brand name.

Once you are done with the home page, you can follow the process and apply the same method for other priority pages. Here you can consider your product pages, services page, Contact Information or about the organization pages. You need to write title tags that incorporate relevant keyword associated with that page’s contents. It would be great if you could add your brand name at the end of the title tag.

Note that title tags should only be 50-60 characters in length (65 max), so you have limited space to work with.

Duplicate Pages

Duplicate pages are generally the pages with different URL and same content. Most commonly business websites face these problems after creating multiple promotional landing pages. If you are a business owner and having a website with an on-going promotion then you need a promotional landing page. But you need to be very careful while using same content on different pages. For example, you are offering discount or cashback and running an advertisement campaign for the same, your users are landing on your promotional page but if you are planning to re-launch campaign after certain period of time, then you need a new promotional landing page with fresh content related to campaign.

Pro Tip: You can also use noindex tag to avoid such problems on promotional pages. It is a good practice to avoid getting promotional pages cached.

Missing Contact Information

Internet is a virtual world where you need to create trust between your website visitors or users. If you are running a product/services website then providing proper contact information is mandatory for you. However, if you are running a blog or informative portal then you can provide basic contact information such as email or alternative contact resources as such social pages. Create a contact page according to your website/blog and provide relevant information to your website visitors/users.

The ideal position of providing contact information is at the header section of website or at the footer of every page on your website. That way any visitors to the site can easily get in contact with you when they’re looking at your homepage or a product/service page.

Missing or Template Meta data

Creating Meta data is one of the most important tasks while working for better SEO results. This is one of the most common SEO mistakes which people made while creating content pages. You need to create unique Meta data for every page you have on your website. Using same Meta description would be counted as duplicate Meta description. Never use Meta description templates for pages.

Pro Tip: If you have uploaded images on your blog/website then do the Image Optimization to avoid getting errors of duplicate Meta. In earlier version of Google Webmaster Tool, we used to get reports of duplicate Meta tags under “HTML Improvements” which is scheduled to be removed by March 29 2019.

But unfortunately, these reports are removed and now we can third party tools to track down the duplicate Meta data.

Once you start working on these on page SEO Mistakes, you will get the best possible outcome.

Let’s discuss some Common SEO Mistake in while doing Off Page SEO

Not Optimizing Toxic Backlinks

This is of the most common SEO mistakes we do while doing Off-Page SEO. It gives us a great feeling when we see number of backlinks in search console under “Top linking sites”. But it is equally important to filter the results and find out toxic backlinks and get rid of them as quick as possible. For this you need to check the spam score of the referring domain and if you find it less trustworthy then use disavow tool to get rid of that link. (Here is how to use Disavow Tool)

In Above image you can see few toxic links which I need to get rid for better backlinking results. You can also optimize your backlinks on regular basis to get better performance. It will also help you to decrease the chances of search engine penalty and spam attacks.

Mobile Friendliness

According to significant growth in mobile traffic, it is important for every website/blog owner to create a mobile friendly website. Having a good UI/UX would work on desktop and laptop devices but it won’t work on mobile device until you get a responsive or mobile friendly portal. Mobile searches are taking over desktop searches and very soon the difference between mobile searches and desktop searches would be huge. So you should always consider your audience preferred device. If you are not sure about the most preferred device used for your website then you can take help of google analytics.

Here is how you can find which device is used to surf your website or blog.

Login to google analytics

Go to “Audience” from left hand side menu

Choose Mobile and select “Overview”

Refer the screenshot below:

As you can see in the image, I can easily identify which device is used by user to surf my website by the help of google analytics.

Blocking Script

Not everyone is doing this but few website owners user this method to avoid search engines to read huge CSS or Java Script. They put Disallow tag in robots.txt file so that crawlers could skip the script and read HTML only. Fooling crawlers is not a good idea if you are looking for long term growth. If you are worried about the heavy scripts then try to minify them and increase the use of HTML as much as possible.

Incorrect use of NoFollow

It is also one of the common SEO mistakes which we do if we have user generated content on domain or subdomains or external links. If you are running a website and have external links such as partners, sponsors, affiliations, recommendations then you can put the nofollow tag on those external links. Basically it is the concept to inform search engines about the links which are not related to your website/business. But I have seen people using the same technique on social pages and sub-domain user generated data in the form of comments and feedbacks.

So this was the list of few common SEO mistakes which we do while doing SEO. Do comment below your feedback and share your suggestions if you want to add some more points in it. Hope this information would help you to avoid these mistakes and perform better SEO for your website or blog.