5 Mistakes Many Smart People Keep Making in SEO

5 SEO Mistakes many Smart People Keep Making_YWF-01

Before starting this article, I would like to remind you that everyone makes mistakes, so whether you have been in this industry for years or a new player, you will likely make mistakes and the only way to minimalize the mistakes is to learn about your mistakes. There will be many SEO mistakes to talk about, but primarily, we want to share some of them with you, so that you can identify and avoid them and then hopefully, it can gain you success faster and more efficiently. If you are a business owner, don’t forget to share this knowledge to your SEO services agency too.

  1. Serving Bots Before Humans

If your SEO efforts are still all about chasing algorithms, or trying to trick search engines, you’d better leave it all behind, since now what it takes to rank well today is exactly the same as what it takes to satisfy visitors.

Unfortunately, many people still think about putting bots above actual humans which can result in ineffective tactics like keyword stuffing, specific content length, and manipulative linking schemes. I understand that this kind of thinking works in the olden days, but in today’s SEO environment, you really need to change your paradigm.

This is because the main priority in SEO is to always focus on your human visitors, since they are the people that will buy and use your products or services. For example, the main idea of creating a mobile-friendly website is to satisfy mobile users with lots of useful, original, and well-written content that can load quickly.

  1. Thinking about Tactics Instead of Strategies

Many people still mislead between tactics and strategies. In fact, this confusion has become a big problem which causes people to be inefficient and aimless. Therefore, it is important to achieve significant long-term success by having a clear understanding of the difference between the two; here are the simple ways to differentiate them:

  • Strategy: A big picture objective that will give you a significant competitive advantage.
  • Tactics: The actions you have to take to achieve that strategy.

For example, when you want to sell things online, you will use social media selling as your strategy, but providing lots of content per day to make people aware of your products is the tactic.

  1. Failing to Accurately Track Performance

It is important to know exactly how you’re performing, so that you can see whether you’re making sufficient progress or not. Furthermore, instead of relying on your gut instinct, you can try to track your performance through so many powerful tools available that can range from Google Analytics and Search Console to paid tools like Raven, SEMrush, and Moz.

With those tools, you can increase what is working and fix or eliminate what isn’t working well in your campaigns. Besides, you can detect any problem early and it will also allow you to correct it early.

  1. Taking Advice from Questionable Sources

With internet, you can easily find a lot of information, but you need to be careful as information that you get from the internet may have been out-dated, or they can be hoax too. On the other hand, SEO has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. This surely makes it is easy for you to find information that is flat-out false. Therefore, you need to stay on top of SEO by reading the top publication from the trustworthy sources. Furthermore, since SEO is a constantly and rapidly evolving industry, you need to keep learning from many reputable sources.

  1. Not identifying Worthwhile Key Performance Indicators

In SEO, there are many things that you can use as your key performance indicator. However, not all things can be used as a good KPI; it depends on the context. For example, if you determine the number of new links on your website as a KPI, then you will call it a win if there are a lot of links coming from one website, and this is not true, as the links can also come from comment spam.

Therefore, your KPI must be objectively measurable and tied to a specific business goal, such as getting in front of ideal prospects, generating positive PR, or generating revenue, such as a link within content that’s relevant to what you do.

By knowing the 5 mistakes that even smartest people often do, you can prevent yourself from doing the same mistakes. Hopefully, after performing good SEO strategies, you can easily run a good SEO performance for growing and improving your business.

Why Real Time Search Algorithm Updates May be Bad News

bad news

Have you ever wondered what updates will come after Panda, Penguin, and many others? Don’t you worry, recently Google has released real time search algorithm updates which mean no need for searching any name for any update anymore, but on the other side this real-time update will surely make the job of any SEO services will become harder. So, what kind of problem will arise due to this real time search algorithm updates?

  • Troubleshooting Algorithmic Penalties

There are two types of penalties done by Google, algorithmic penalties and manual actions. Algorithmic penalties are a lot more difficult to troubleshoot than manual actions since in manual action, Google informs you of the penalty via the Google Search Console, giving webmasters the ability to address the issues that are negatively impacting their sites. This works oppositely with algorithmic penalty since you will never know if there are any problem exists.

So, how can you know if your web gets any algorithmic penalty? Well, the easiest way to figure it out is to match a decrement in your traffic with the dates of known algorithm updates or you can also determine if there is any algorithmic penalty by seeing if a site ranks high in maps but poorly for organic of different phrases.

  • Lead to Misdiagnosis and Confusion

What makes it is difficult and confusing is the fact that Google’s crawlers don’t crawl pages at the same frequency. So even if you’re keeping a detailed a timeline of website changes or actions, you still have a big chance from getting affected by algorithm update since there could be many other issues with the server or website changes that you may not be aware of that cause it is difficult for not to misdiagnosis of penalties. In fact, some SEO companies who try to take some actions like disavow their files to make a better link building may do more harm than good.

  • Negative SEO

With real time updates, you will need more time and effort to analyze your link building, if your link building is healthy enough or not. If it is not, then it is time for you to remove them.

3 Ways to Get More Links That Count

link building

There are a lot of things which are needed to be considered to make SEO runs well, one of them is by providing links. However, only providing links without exploring to make your links better will not lift your knowledge. SEO developers should also provide links which are counted to make their SEO strategies successful. Below are some of the ways that can be used to provide your SEO with better links.

  • Understand Your Competitors

In search result, your competitor may not be your competitors in business, but merely your competitors in search. For beginners, you may need to list the top keywords you want to rank for. For instance, if you have a website which works for SEO services in Melbourne, you may have a keyword list that includes “Melbourne SEO services”. Then you can check and search for Melbourne SEO services in search engine to see other sites which rank before and after you. These are all your competitors in search, as they are all websites you want to outrank.

 

  • Obtain Your Search Competitors’ Best Links

Utilizing Link Assistant will reveal link partners which link to your competitors by creating a project for your website and penetrating the websites that rank better than you when you search for competitors. You will see the top 30 potential link chances based on their MozRank.

Moreover, Mozrank will also present you the Alexa rank, which includes domain age, number of pages they have indexed in Google, and number of social shares on the top social media networks, such as Facebook, twitter, and etc.

After that, you can continue to add your search competitors’ top backlinks and put them to your potential link partners list. If you want to sort all of the opportunities by the criteria you are most interested in by adding the top backlinks for several of your search competitors, then you can go to your partner details tab to sort it. Moreover, you will find more high quality link chances if you add more search competitors into your project.

 

  • Check for Google Penalties

Google penalties happen when Google updates its algorithm which impacts on many web ranks shake off. There are some kinds of Google Updates, but the newest one is known as Phantom Update. Website Penalty Indicator can be used for those who want to assure their link opportunity is in the highest quality. It permits you to enter a domain and maintain its estimated search traffic, along with markers of major Google updates. Moreover, someone may consider that a link opportunity is not useful in terms of a search engine traffic dip when it is directly related to a Google algorithm change and the site has not recovered their traffic.