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.

3 Techniques on How to Optimize Your Website for Multiple Keywords

How-to-Optimize-Your-Website-for-Multiple-Keywords

With so many updates, nowadays SEO puts more priority on context. This makes context is above keywords. But, this doesn’t mean that you will neglect keywords relevancy and authority. Therefore, as a SEO engineer who works for SEO service, you have to understand and combine what Google wants and what users want.

If you assume that Google will understand the context of your content while you build a strong brand and positive user experience, you will still have to consider about the hierarchy of your content, how to organize it, and how to build context that can rank for multiple keywords, so that it will meet your conversion goals. Below are several tips on how to optimize and focus on keywords.

  1. Know Your Current Content

After determining your conversion goals, you may need to set your analytics house, and conducted keyword research, then you’re ready to organize your keyword data into meaningful topics. Instead of stemming or use all of the literal variations of the terms and its plural or singular versions, you can find sets of terms on the same topic and group them together.

Usually we often fall into the most general topics of the niche or industry when running an e-commerce site. Most B2B sites follow a pattern as well with top-level business industry terms, product or service categories and the products or service themselves.

As keywords grouped into topics, so it is possible to take the important next step of mapping your keywords to existing pages of content or conducting a content audit. As the first step you can run a crawl of the existing site structure with screaming Frog, download the HTML page results into Excel, and then get to work putting topics and terms out to the side of specific pages.

When you know you have content gaps and need to create more, that’s when you can turn around and quickly search to see which websites own the top of the SERPs for those topics and draw inspiration (without copying them) for ways to fill the gaps with your own content and draw inspiration for ways to fill the gaps with your own content and make decisions based on priority.

  1. Optimize Site Architecture

Even though, you can start once you know where you stand with content, then having a plan for filling gaps but first you need to figure out how to organize the content. This means balancing user experience, with product/service offerings and topical keyword search volume. Moreover, build out your site hierarchy working top to bottom going from most general to most specific. Even though, mostly sites are already built this way. However, site navigation and structure is often dictated by an internal or organizational view when SEO isn’t involved.

Besides, you are able to cast a wider net in terms of rankings and visibility, by taking an approach that looks at essentially any page at any level on the site as an entrance point and landing page for one or more topical keywords. In fact, all of your efforts will destruct your message, when you try to rank for too many terms with a single page or section of the site.

  1. Do Your On-Page Optimization

It is surprising that there are so many SEO campaigns that neglected the basics of on-page optimization. In fact, these SEO basics still apply. However, you need to look at it deeper than just trying to merely produce content and organize it well top to bottom in the site. Besides, you need to ensure proper categorization, when you’re building context for the user and Google. Another power in the on-page variables is having all factors working together with architecture and on-page optimization.

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.