Nothing makes a marketer’s blood run cold quite like three little letters – SEO.
It’s possibly the most confusing acronym out there. People simply don’t understand how to properly engage in search engine optimization. That’s why they make so many mistakes.
It might seem like you have to be a part of some secret club to avoid making SEO mistakes, but that’s not the case. You’re about to learn all about those common mistakes and, more importantly, how to avoid them.
– Worrying About Keyword Density Over Placement
Here’s a bold statement, but it’s true.
Keyword density is dead.
If you’re staying up at night trying to figure out how to make your keyword appear naturally in 3 percent of your copy, you’re wasting your time and energy.
Keyword density doesn’t matter, but placement sure does.
Longtail keywords need to appear in the page’s title, URL, meta description, and image description. These keywords also need to be in at least one of your subheaders.
If you properly place your keywords, you’ll be golden. They will have a much bigger impact than they would if you used them 20 times in the copy.
– Hiring Essay Writers to Save Money
Hiring an average essay writer from a custom writing service isn’t really the best choice when it comes to SEO copywriting. First, these services are cheap for a reason. The academic writers can be professional assistants with student papers but it’s highly crucial to remember that writing a content without a SEO in mind is like hiring a painter to put down a wood floor. When it comes to SEO writing, you need the right person for the job. You might have to spend a little more to get it, but it’s well worth it.
– Only Worrying About Machines
The early 2000s were like the Wild West of SEO. Marketers would find an underused keyword, write some terrible content for it, and get the first-page ranking.
Guess what. They made a killing. Google realized it had a problem on its hands. Its algorithms were letting people manipulate the system, and the end users suffered. People were stuck reading horrible content that was written for machines instead of people.
That changed in 2011.
Google used human evaluators to rate websites. That isn’t a sustainable business model, so it added machine learning into the mix. The machines learned how to predict when humans would give a site a poor rating. Once the machine learning system was ready, Google unveiled its new Panda update and the machines were off to the races. They were able to pick out poorly written content in a matter of seconds.
Suddenly, all those sites with poor content fell in the rankings, and sites that contained valuable, well-written content moved up.
That was just one of many updates. Google’s algorithms keep getting better and better, so quality is more important than ever before.
So, how do you create content the new algorithms will like? It’s all about the end user. Create high-quality content that includes information that isn’t readily available online. Use short paragraphs and break the content up with subheaders.
Oh, and be sure to proofread everything. Grammatical mistakes and spelling errors hurt readability.
– Believing That Shorter Really Is Sweeter
So, you have about 10 minutes. That’s just enough time to bang out 100 or so words. You can throw your blog post up and make it to the restaurant in time for dinner.
Problem solved, right?
Actually, you aren’t doing yourself any favors if you only write short content. Sure, you can write some short content from time to time, but you need to include some long-form content, as well.
Long-form content gets more social media engagement and conversions than short-form content does. It also generates more high-quality leads.
You can even expect your site to rank higher if it utilizes long-form content. Put 2,000 words or so on each page of your website. Also, write long-form blog posts from time to time. Then, watch as your site’s performance improves.
– Sticking with Stale Content
You’ve written an amazing blog post. This post is killer. You might finally get your Pulitzer. That’s how good it is.
It’s so good that you decide to let your blog sit for a while without any follow-ups. After all, if you add more posts, it will just bury your amazing content.
Here’s the thing, though. Google loves fresh content. If you don’t provide it with fresh content, it’s going to knock your site down a ranking or two.
If you really want people to see your amazing blog posts, keep them coming. Update your blog on a weekly basis, and don’t be afraid to freshen up your website copy, either. A little sprucing up could do your website some good.
Create an SEO Plan
Once you understand how to avoid these mistakes, you can create an SEO plan. Your plan needs to include properly placed keywords inside of content that is written for the user instead of machines. You need to include some long-form content into the mix and add fresh content on a regular basis. Finally, don’t hire essay writers since that might be the death of your SEO strategy.If you can do all this, your SEO strategy will be in great shape.
