Search engine optimization can be quite complicated. This is especially true if you’re new to it. However, it’s not as difficult and technical as some ‘experts’ claim. Still, the learning curve can be fairly steep.
Truthfully, there’s a very good chance. Unless you’re a seasoned expert, you’ve likely made many mistakes optimizing your website.
Don’t get too discouraged about that. After all, making mistakes is a great way to learn, right? Of course, the first step is realizing you messed up.
To that end, here are a few of the lesser-known mistakes many webmasters tend to make when optimizing their site.
You’re Not Mixing Things Up With Your Titles And Descriptions
While I understand that there are only so many ways to describe a product, service, or brand, you need to ensure that you keep your title tags and meta descriptions as unique as possible.
Duplicate content is a serious problem for optimization. Google has a long history of penalizing websites for it. Often, these penalties are severe. Therefore, you need to ensure all content on your website is unique. This includes the descriptive elements.
Local Search Isn’t On Your Radar
Here’s an interesting statistic for you to chew on – according to Google, four in five consumers use search engines to find local products, services, or experiences. Not only that, the vast majority of these searches lead to some form of action. Someone looking up movie times, for example, will likely proceed to visit a theater.
What all of this means is simple: if you aren’t at least placing a passing focus on local search results in your SEO efforts, you’re probably missing out on a big chunk of traffic.
Your Traffic Sources Aren’t Diverse Enough
You might be surprised by this. If you focus only on getting traffic from one source, you’ll actually end up hurting your site.
You need to pull visitors from – and foster awareness through – every avenue you can. This includes social media likes and shares, search, brand mentions, and affiliate links.
You’ve Made A Website That Can’t Be Crawled
Google’s “robots” read your website. They decide its ranking by ‘crawling’ it. However, they can’t do this if your website is too big or complicated.
When mapping out your website, go by the “rule of three” – meaning that no page on your site is more than three clicks away from your homepage. This’ll allow search engines to access every page – and prevent you from missing out on any traffic.
You Think Ranking Is The Sole Measure Of Success
There was a time. It wasn’t too long ago. Back then, your search engine ranking was the only thing that determined your website’s success.Today, that’s no longer the case.
You shouldn’t ignore search engine traffic. However, it shouldn’t be your only goal when optimizing your website. This is especially true because only Google knows exactly how rankings are determined. Anyone who claims to know for sure is likely lying.
I’d even go so far as to say that your site’s ranking should be the least of your concerns when you’re optimizing your website.
Instead, you should simply focus on creating a great website with awesome content. A well-written, valuable article can be easily optimized after it’s been put together, but no amount of optimization will save a spun, poorly written trash-bin piece.
Learning From Your Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes at one time or another. What separates success from failure is the capacity to learn from those mistakes, and use them to adapt one’s approach.That applies to every field – not just search engine optimization.
