Do Not Make These Common SEO Mistakes

Posted by: Neil on Saturday, September 4th, 2010

Is it difficult doing everything you can think of just trying to get your site to rank higher when it comes to search results? Why aren't you getting ranked higher, then? Lots of people who have new websites try to get their sites to rank higher but they don't use the rules they know in the backs of their minds. The rules search engines set for their ranking requirements are always being changing and the means of optimizing websites are changing as well. If you want to stay ahead of the crowd and see your site on the first page of Google, you need to avoid making the following mistakes. Working on these will help you get better results from your efforts, regardless of your budget.

Before you start, you should grab a copy of Market Samurai. Don't expect results to happen overnight because they won't. Patience is a must for SEO. The outcome of sticking with it will be a boatload of traffic. If you want to get your site in front of tens of thousands of people you must be ready to go the extra mile. You must be committed to the basics, which many people choose to ignore; link building, adding unique content to your site on a regular basis, and doing onsite SEO.

The second big mistake is internally linking your pages wrong. Your internal linking structure is one more of the few SEO factors that you completely control. A good linking strategy makes your site easier to brows and the search engines love it and will give your site a higher ranking. Instead of focusing on sending your visitors away you should concentrate on linking all of your related pages together in a logical fashion. This is an under applied SEO method that is proven to produce results. If you want your new pages to get indexed fast then this is the way to go. A perfect example of a good internal linking structure is Wikipedia; notice how they have all of these links that send you to a page with a similar topic? For an online dating tips site, that means you need to have relevant articles, like Match.com vs eHarmony.

Ignoring or overlooking the guidelines offered by the search engines is a big mistake.

These need to be looked at heavily so that you don't commit any SEO techniques that could get you a penalty with the search engines. These guidelines are regularly updated by the search engines, so keeping a constant vigil will keep your website clean in their eyes. One great example of this is Google and how they change their algorithm constantly, and that's why you need to learn about those changes so that you never drop in the rankings.

Overall, search engine optimization involves you to achieve a strong balance between the on-page SEO and the off-page SEO. The more you practice optimizing your site, the better results you will get. Just make sure you're building links naturally with good amount of internal linking. If you are ready to get started with SEO, make sure to read this guide on Link wheels.