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Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a major role in a website’s success. Whether it’s a blog, e-commerce website, lead generation sign, newsletter signup “landing page,” etc., it needs traffic to succeed. While you can always pay for traffic via pay-per-click marketing platforms like Google Adwords, a less expensive and arguably more effective solution is to optimize your website for higher search rankings.
But there’s no guarantee of success when it comes to SEO. Sure, your website may rank well, but it could also fall off the radar never to be seen or heard from again. The good news is that you can improve your chances of success by following some basic strategies while avoiding others. In today’s blog post we’re going to reveal some critical SEO mistakes you’ll want to avoid when optimizing your website.
The first SEO mistake that we’re going to discuss is duplicate content. Granted, most websites have at least some form of duplicate content, whether it’s their terms and conditions page, excerpts from other articles, or content that’s published on multiple pages within the site itself. However, if your site contains 50% or more duplicate content, there’s a serious issue at hand that needs to be addressed. Even if your website is fully functional, allowing duplicate content to remain present could hurt your site’s search rankinks.
Buying links is another no-no that you’ll want to avoid. Google has cracked down on paid links in recent years, penalizing offending sites by lowering their rankings or removing them from its index altogether. Unless you want to see this happen to your site, you should stick with natural, unpaid links.
As noted by Google, the best way to generate backlinks is to create high-quality content that people actually want to read and share.
“The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it,” wrote Google.
A third SEO mistake to avoid is failure to create search engine-friendly page URLs. What does this mean? When creating new pages within your website, make sure they are given relevant, keyword-rich names. So instead of yoursite.com/?=123, perhaps you can use yoursite.com/critical-seo-mistakes-to-avoid. Doing so is a simple way to improve your website’s search engine visibility while helping visitors find the content they desire.