In this article, I’m going to document some important SEO mistakes that I came across. Visit this page regularly because I’m going to update it from time to time. Whenever I come across a new mistake that worth noting, I will list it here.
Simply avoiding these mistakes can drastically improve your search engine ranking.
Let’s start with the most common mistake of all……
1. Going after competitive keywords
General keywords are usually competitive keywords. If you do not conduct any form of keyword research, chances are you will think of keywords that are too general and hence too competitive.
For example, if a person runs an internet marketing related blog, he may want to optimize his blog for “make money online” (which has 149 million competing webpages!!). Someone running a Forex website may want to optimize his site for “forex trading” (which has 11 million competing webpages!!).
Aiming for competitive keywords with huge demand is not wrong, but it’s too ambitious. You may be building links like mad, but still wonder why you are not seeing any improvement in your search engine ranking.
The secret here is to go for keywords with some demand and low competition.
I’m not going to go into the details of how to do keyword research because I’ve written about it in Long Tail Keyword Research – A Step-By-Step Guide.
2. Optimizing for too many different keyword phrases per webpage
Don’t be overly ambitious and try to optimize too many keyword phrases for one webpage (including homepage).
For example, I’ve seen a marketer trying to optimize his homepage for “make money online fast”, “affiliate marketing for newbies” and “internet marketing strategies”.
Assuming the keywords have low competition “which I doubt so”, how is he going to include all these keywords into his title tag, which is an important factor in search engine optimization (Read SEO Tutorial Part 1 for details)?
The story will be different if he tries to optimize for “proven ways to make money online fast”, “ways to make money online”, “ways to make money online fast”, “make money online fast”. In this approach, it may seem that he is also trying to optimize many keyword phrases, but technically, all the keyword phrases are linked.
He can have a title tag of “proven ways to make money online fast”. For link building, he can start with “proven ways to make money online fast” and “ways to make money online fast”, which may be an easy target to shoot. Then he can challenge harder keywords such as “ways to make money online” and “make money online fast” and eventually “make money online”. The best part is, his link building effort will help to prove the ranking for all the keywords.
Let me share with you a real-life example. For LeadsLeap.com, our aim is to get to the top rank for “lead generation”. But we started with a longer keyword phrase of “free lead generation system”, and then slowly work our way up. When building links, we began with “free lead generation system”, then move on to “lead generation system” and then to “lead generation”. See the point?
As of today, we are in the first page for keywords like “free lead generation system”, “free lead generation”, “lead generation system” and even “free lead system”. We can optimize for several keywords at one time because they are all related, and we start with long tail keywords.
Lastly I want to emphasize that a website can be built to target unlimited keywords, but EACH webpage in a website, including the homepage, should only be built to target limited number of keywords, preferably linked keywords. If you have 2 keyword phrases that are totally different, you should prepare 2 articles and build 2 webpages for each of them.
3. Poor onpage optimization
This is usually a newbie’s mistake, where his webpage is not optimized for the keyword he is targeting. For example, the title tag may not include the keyword he is trying to optimize, or worse still the content doesn’t have the keyword at all. (Read SEO Tutorial Part 1 for details).
4. Dynamic links
You may want to note that search engines treat dynamic links as unique webpages.
For example, to Google,
http://domain.com/blog/?p=1 is one webpage;
http://domain.com/blog/?p=2 is another webpage.
This may seem obvious since default WordPress links look like this, but not so obvious in some cases.
A typical scenario is when you want to track the click-through. For example, if you post an article in Ezinearticles and you want to track the click-through, your link may look like this:
http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234
To Google,
http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234 is one webpage;
http://domain.com/my-article.php is another webpage!!!!
So from link building standpoint, you are building links for http://domain.com/my-article.php?track=1234, not http://domain.com/my-article.php.
5. SEO unfriendly website structure
Lastly, you may want to note that what you see on your webpage may not be what the search engine spider sees.
Case 1 – iframe
Some webpages are built using iframe. Without going into the details, iframe is simply a html code that allows a webpage to show contents from one or more webpages.
For example, webpage A may be full of contents, but if you view the source code, you can only see two links, one to webpage B and one to webpage C. What you see in webpage A is actually contents from B and C. To search engine spiders, webpage A has no content!
Case 2 – javascript
Similarly, some webpages may be drawing contents through javascripts. To site visitors, the webpage is full of content, but if you look at the source code, the webpage is just a bunch of javascript codes.
This is common in some plug and play systems, where you are promised to have instant online store or instant website, but those kinds of websites are only good for advertisement-generated traffic. They cannot be optimized for search engine traffic at all! Be careful when you buy into such a system.
Case 3 – excessive use of WordPress plugins
For those of you who have your own self-hosted WordPress blog, you will know that the market has tons of plugins that you can use on your blog, and some of them claim to boost your search engine ranking.
My advice is, know your fundamentals well before using them.
I have seen a blog with 2 different title tags, 2 different meta descriptions and 2 different meta keywords for every webpage. I believe they are generated by different plugins. The blogger may have installed 2 SEO plugins and both are trying to “optimize” the page.
I have also seen a blog with an “index,follow” meta tag and a “noindex,nofollow” meta tag, both on the same page! No one in his right mind will do that, but it can be possible if you use different kinds of plugins that work independently from each other to achieve different objectives.
Ok, that’s all for today. I’ll continue to add more common SEO mistakes when I come across them.
Next week, in Part 3 of our SEO tutorial series, I’m going to discuss ALL ABOUT LINK BUILDING.
If you have any questions or doubt about link building, post them below before next Friday. I will try to cover them in the next post.
This is some of the best advive I have read on SEO. Number 2 is especially powerful.
Learning a lot reading this Free SEO tutorial series. SEO services are too costly hence it’s advisable that Internet marketers learn and apply SEO concepts themselves for their websites. Growing number of Unique targeted relevant content pages + SEO + Effective monetization = Ever growing residual online income :)
Some very good advice here, especially about too many plug-ins. Also, make sure you pay attention to plug-in updates. Most of the time, they’re good but sometimes developers can add elements that weren’t included when the plug-ins were first installed.In that case, it could negatively affect the way spiders read your site.
Thanks for your great tutorials.They are easy to understand and I have no trouble applying your tips to my website. I’ll be sure to tell my friends about your site.
Thank you once again Kenneth. Your advice is invaluable.
Thanks Kenneth for always providing with many useful tips for us.
As next week you will discuss on link building, I have few requests here:
1. Please explain in detail what a backlink is.
2. How to add a backlink? I need to add my backlink (a link to a targeted website) in my blog or how to do???
3. Please give a clear explanation using an example to show how to add a backlink. For example if I have a blog ABC and my targeted website is (Leadleap or Yahoo page or other people’s blog), how is the step to so called ” add a back link”.
I still don’t know how to add a backlink and do pingback etc..
Appreciate your time to explain all this.
Thanks
1) Your first question is answered in http://www.leadsleap.com/blog/the-power-of-seo-backlinks-a-classic-example/
2) Your other questions are html basics, nothing to do with SEO. Just Google for “How to add a backlink” and you’ll get tons of answers.
3) It seems that your understanding of backlink is reversed! Backlink are links FROM other websites TO your site, not from YOUR site TO other sites.
Thanks, I really need to learn these things.. I have been marketing for years and have not much idea about how to use the right keywords..
Thank you so much!!
Excellent guide and really common mistakes.Thanks for sharing
Kenneth,
When we think SEO, both onpage & offpage SEO is important to get targated traffic from search engines. This is what You have described in this article.
Thanks
.
This is really good SEO information your handing out Kennoth, thank you. What’s your opinion on how many times you should include your main keyword in a post or an article? Everyone seems to have their own idea on this.
Everyone has different idea because there isn’t a fixed rule. There were, in the past, but not now. Less emphasis is put in that. Just try to add 2 or 3. More is not good. None is not good also.
Brilliant as ever,now I just need more time to place in effect
Hi Kenneth, thanks for your Part 2 of SEO tutorial.
I must say I really appreciate your time and effort to write all these pages for us to read for free where outside internet marketers are charging thousands of dollars to attend their courses.
I only have 1 question which I really really hope you can answer for me.
Question: What if we have already built a webpage or homepage with they keywords that we want and search engines had indexed it and included in their search results. Yet we discovered that we use the wrong keywords on a later stage.
Do you think search engines will rank low or in worse case, de-index our webpage or homepage if we make changes to our keywords? Because it may seem to them that we are trying to manipulate the search results.
Last thing is, I hope you can cover a bit on “deep links” in your future posts. I don’t understand till now why people keep mentioning that deep links are better. Thanks.
1) When you change the keyword, old keyword will definitely suffer a drop in ranking. New keyword will take time to crawl up the ranking. That’s perfectly normal and usual. Google won’t think you are trying to manipulate the result.
2) Deep linking means linking to the internal pages of your website instead of just the homepage. The more links you have, the merrier, whether it’s linking to homepage or deep linking.
Thanks for the tips Kenneth! Tier 2 keywords are easier to rank for and often drive more targeted traffic than Tier 1 keywords.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the strategic process of optimizing a website so that it ranks higher in the search engines naturally or organically.
With over 68% of the world using Google on a daily basis for their search results, you can imagine the kind of FREE traffic you can get if you rank high for certain keywords, including three and four word keyword phrases!
Hi ken,
I have a question for you which is about the wordpress plugins
what seo plugin would you use as according to your article some of them work against each other. As i am new to seo and am reading all i can on this subject and i feel i don;t know enough about seo to write the key words for each article so i try to get a plug in to help and suggest words and use them. Not sure if that is the correct way even. I am using seo ultimate
any thought on this subject would help as i understand that to work at cross purposes is even worse than not at all.
Thanks
I have another question from reading the comments, deep linking is where you link to other pages on your website. If that is the case will permalink cover this or is there another process to doing this?
After all these years marketing online, I though I heard it all. Until now. Good advice.
Thank you for the information.
I love to buy the plug and play websites because they are so quick to put on line and sooooo cheap to.
I wonder why????
Well I just found out why with number 5 above.
So, that means the one I just bought today for $7.00 is the last one.
Although that is pretty cheap PLR for re-writing or spinning.
It’s too bad it’s taken me 2 years to learn some basics.
Thanks again
Hi Kenneth, thanks for these SEO tips. It’s easy to commit mistakes specially when optimizing too many keywords for a page. These tips will definitely help us with optimizing our site.
Gerry
Hi Kenneth, thanks for these SEO tips. It’s easy to commit mistakes specially when optimizing too many keywords for a page. These tips will definitely help us with optimizing our site.
Gerry
My site is staying page 8 – 9 for key word “lingerie” and I tried so mnay ways but could not make it little bit advice. any suggestion? thanks
Great advice! I will be implementing the advice from second section on keyword targeting. I haven’t thought about it like that. But that is the way to target more than one keyword per page. I know in my experience, it happens naturally sometimes. But purposefully targeting will get the results I want. Thanks.
Great article. thank you so much!
Hi Buddy,
Our website “www.w3seoexpert.com” on Google.com.pk 1st 8th position with “seo company in Pakistan” keyword but i want to my website on 1st or 2nd position than please give any tips or suggestion.
Regard,
Asifjahfar
Hi,
I want Google 1st page ranking in “Google.com.pk” search engine. Please give me tips how to get top ranking and also give me link building guidelines.
Regard,
Amir
hi
its all info is very useful if some one get on the right way
very useful info