Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2019

Did you know that there are almost 2 billion websites on the internet, more than 5 billion Google searches and more than 4 million articles published every day on the internet? How do you make your website come up on Google’s first page considering that 90% of internet users don’t go past the first page of search engine results? The answer is obvious, by doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, many sites owners don’t get SEO right and for that reason, we are going to highlight some common SEO mistakes to avoid in 2019.

Keyword Errors

One of the most effective SEO strategies is using keywords but this can be done badly and instead of yielding positive results, it can lead to getting penalized by Google.
Keyword stuffing: this is when sites owners try to manipulate Google algorithms by repeating certain keywords throughout the article. It makes the article bad to read and will also get the article flagged. The keyword density is the number of times a keyword is used in an article, keep it to 3% of the article word count, so that it will flow naturally with the rest of the article while also meeting search engines standards.

Not inputting keyword in the title and URL: this is certainly one of the common SEO mistakes to avoid in 2019. Using keywords in the content is not enough, ensure that you input the keyword in the title tag and URL to increase the chances of your page coming up first on SERPs.

Use long-tail keywords: if you’re already a big brand in your niche, you can use any of the top 100 keywords, three-word, two-word or even one-word keywords in your niche, but as a relatively new brand this is a common SEO mistake to avoid. Instead, stick to long-tail keywords that are not exactly competitive such as five-word keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

Poor Quality Content

One of the most common SEO mistakes is bad content, that is when you publish poor quality articles.
Plagiarized content: this is a no-no, stop doing it, make sure your blog posts are 100% unique. Google doesn’t like thin content that offers no value either, so stop using spinners to write articles.

Duplicate pages: this is one of the common SEO mistake to avoid that is surprisingly still rampant in 2019. Some sites owners think that it is easier to deceive Google by repeating the same content using slightly different words but still the same keywords. This is going to get your website flagged in the long run.

Use Quality long-form content: quality articles with 1500+ words are said to be 9x more effective than short articles, in fact, long-form articles are no longer what they used to be, 3000 – 10,000 words articles are gradually taking over. So, if you don’t know how to create unique and good quality articles or don’t have the time, just hire a good content writer.

Broken Pages – Error 404

One of the common SEO mistakes to avoid but sadly, many sites owners are not aware of it, how damaging it is and how to resolve it. Broken pages can occur in two ways but we are going to highlight the one that’s relevant to the topic. This is when there is a backlink(s) leading to a page that’s been deleted. Let’s say your website is iamreadingthispage.com and you published an article about content marketing which we found informative and decided to hyperlink in an article we published on www.carry.website, but after a while, you decided to delete the article. The problem is, whenever someone clicks on the hyperlink, it won’t take them to the page because you have deleted it, instead, it will show Error 404. For you, the link is an internal broken link while for us, it is an external broken link and it is bad for both of us because Google thinks we are wasting its resources and time.

Redirect 301: find out whether you have any internal broken link, then redirect them. This can be hard if you have multiple web pages and articles but there are software tools available to help you find broken pages nowadays. Ensure that you redirect the broken internal links to relevant pages. Using the example above, since the broken page was originally about content marketing, you have to redirect it to a page about content marketing, don’t just randomly redirect to home page, about us page, or cybersecurity page, etc.

Over To You
By taking note of these common SEO mistakes to avoid in 2019, your site too can rank high on search engines.