Beginners to SEO make mistakes either because they are not aware of the basic SEO best practices or because they don’t understand them correctly.
SEO is a fast-changing industry and what worked a few years or months ago may not work today. It is thus important to stay educated and informed about the latest SEO developments.
In this post you will read about the 18 most common SEO mistakes to avoid and what to do instead.
Here is the list:
- You are not using a keyword research tool
- Your page titles and descriptions are not unique
- You are not active in social media
- You don’t actively promote your blog posts
- You are not using Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools
- You are not following a consistent publishing schedule
- Your content is not of high quality
- You are not following internal linking best practices
- You have a slow loading web site
- You are building incoming links too fast
- You are building low quality links
- You are creating pages for SEO purposes only
- You are using press releases for building links
- You are targeting high traffic keywords only
- You have separated SEO from your overall digital marketing strategy
- You are not using the h1 tag correctly
- You are not formatting your content
- Your images are not SEO optimized
1. You are not using a keyword research tool
Some people believe that by using a keyword research tool before creating their content, they are somehow cheating. This is nowhere close to the truth, it is in fact a big SEO mistake.
A keyword research tool such as SEMRUSH or the Google keyword tool will give you an indication of what queries people type in the Google Search Box.
By including those keywords in your articles or pages, you make the content more relevant to your users and easier to understand for the search engines.
2. Your page titles and descriptions are not unique
This is probably the biggest SEO mistake and despite the emphasis given by both Google and Bing, still some webmasters do not provide unique titles for each page.
The title of a page is a very important SEO signal. This is what search engines and users read first when they try to understand what a page is about.
If you fail to provide them with a title that is meaningful to both (search crawlers and users) you will minimize your chances of ranking high on Google (and other search engines) and in addition you drive visitors away from your web page.
The most common mistakes are:
- Having all pages under the same title
- Including the website name in the page title (it’s ok to do that for the homepage but it’s not needed for the rest of the pages)
- Making the page titles more than 65 characters in length
How to write SEO friendly titles:
- Titles should be max 60 characters.
- They have to be natural and describe what the page is about.
- They need to include keywords but not keyword stuffing.
- They have to be unique for each web page.
- Titles are shown in the SERPS (search engine results pages) so they also need to be attractive to the user in order to receive more clicks.
Not proving a meta description
Another SEO mistake is not to provide for a unique meta description for each and every page.
A good meta description can increase your click through rates (CTR) and if your content delivers what promised in the description, it is more likely to increase your conversion rate as well.
Descriptions should be unique (between 150-160 characters), non-keyword stuffed and attractive to the user.
Pro Tip: Read my seo tips for beginners article (point 1) on how to SEO your page titles and descriptions.
3. You are not active in social media
Social media is one of the best and most effective ways to promote your website or new content.
It is a huge mistake if you are not active in at least one social media platform.
Most SEO experts agree that social signals are gaining more ground as a ranking factor and besides the hidden SEO benefits, social media is also a good source of traffic.
You don’t have to be active in all networks, or to spend a lot of time socializing without a purpose.
You need to find which platform is best suited to your audience and try to build authority and trust by following the leaders in your niche and sharing informative and useful content.
4. You don’t actively promote your blog posts
Don’t expect that because you’ve written what you think is a good post, people will start sharing it on Facebook or tweeting about it.
This is not going to happen in the beginning or until you have managed to build a decent audience (which includes hundreds of email subscribers, thousands of Facebook followers and tens of twitter followers).
Promoting your own work in the beginning is not a mistake at all and it is not something you should be shy about.
It will take a lot of effort, good content and persistence for others to share your work, but once you get to this point everything else becomes easier.
How to promote your blog posts? There are a lot of ways but the most effective are:
- Publish it on your social media pages (both personal and business)
- Share it with your followers (both personal and business)
- Use Facebook Ads to promote your posts to a pre-defined targeted audience (based on the profile of your average visitor)
- Write a summary of the post and publish it on LinkedIn (use LinkedIn publishing platform for long-form posts)
- Send it to your email list
- Link to it from older posts (internal linking)
- Write a guest post and publish it in an authoritative website and link to your post.
5. You are not using Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools
Not having your website registered with Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools is like driving with your eyes closed.
Both Google and Bing created the webmaster tools as a way to help website owners find out more about their web properties.
There is absolutely no valid reason why you should not register your website.
There are many benefits to gain and the process is simple and even a beginner can do it.
Instead of guessing what might be wrong and you are not getting as much search engine traffic as you should, open your eyes and take advantage of the feedback given to you by search engines.
6. You are not following a consistent publishing schedule
It doesn’t matter if you publish new content daily, every other day or once a week; what is more important is having a consistent publishing schedule.
Decide in advance how many times you plan to publish new content (and when) and stick to that plan, no matter what.
What I do to make sure that I don’t miss out my plan is prepare a few blog posts in advance so that I have one week to 10 days to find some time and craft new content.
Consistency does have an SEO value and it does bring in more traffic.
Pro Tip: You can also read my previous post: How often should you publish new content to get an idea of how you can create your publishing plan.
7. Your content is not of high quality
Latest trends in SEO are about authority and trust.
Your goal is to build trust between your website and users and authority between your website and search engines.
One of the ways (it’s not the only way) to build authority is by constantly publishing high quality content.
It’s a huge SEO mistake to concentrate on anything else and forget about the importance of content.
Instead of trying to have as many pages published, try to build authority and trust through your content. The benefits are a lot and go beyond achieving high rankings.
What is authoritative content? Content that has the following characteristics:
- Informative and useful to the user
- Accurate
- Insightful
- Analytical
- Unbiased
Pro tip: I urge you to read how to write SEO friendly blogs to get an idea on how to create high quality content and avoid this very basic SEO mistake.
8. You are not following internal linking best practices
Inter-linking your pages together is necessary for 3 reasons:
- You help search engines discover more pages from your website
- A link to an internal page is a signal to search engines that this page is important for your site
- You help users find out more about a subject they are interested in.
Most web site owners don’t even bother to make internal links either because they believe it’s a waste of time or because they are not aware that internal links are good for SEO.
What is internal linking?
Internal linking is when you link from a page to another page in the same website.
Internal links are great for SEO since they allow you to create your own small web by linking your pages together. This helps search engines discover or revisit pages from your website and also gives extra information to users about a particular topic.
The most common mistakes that many webmasters do with internal linking are:
- Not using internal linking at all
- Using too many internal links
- Not using descriptive anchor text when linking to another page
Best practices for internal links are:
Google has many times mentioned that webmasters should pay attention to internal links because it helps them navigate a website better.
The screenshot below is from the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide published by Google a few years ago.
- Make the links descriptive and avoid using anchor text like “click here” “these” or other words that does not help Google and users understand what the linking page is about.
- Don’t use tag clouds – this is a bad practice of internal links
- When possible add the internal links within the main text of the page (and not in the sidebar)
- Don’t always use keywords in the anchor text but use text that flows naturally in your content.
- Don’t always link new pages with older pages but go back and link old pages with new pages. I know this is hard but you have to add this task in your schedule.
- Make sure that the pages you want to rank higher in the SERPS have the most internal links. You can view the relevant report in Google Search Console.
- Aim to have 2-10 internal links per page (depending on the length and type of content).
Here is an example of a good internal link: “An SEO friendly website has a good internal linking structure”.
9. You have a slow loading web site
It is really a crime not taking advantage of speed as a ranking factor. If there is one factor that we know for sure that it affects your ranking position, this is page speed.
Google and Bing want to make the web faster and they are doing everything they can from their part to make this happen.
I know from my experience talking to clients that trying to improve the loading time of a website is not the easiest task to do but it is a mistake ignoring it.
A faster website will bring more traffic (due to higher rankings), will generate more sales and more page views.
If you are running ads on your web site (like AdSense) a faster web site will also generate more ad clicks and ad revenue.
How to improve the loading time of your web site?
You basically have 2 options. The first one is outsourcing this task to a professional team and let them find their way through the bits and bytes and the other way is doing it yourself.
For the first option you can hire a developer through upwork.com or peopleperhour.com.
For the DIY solution, you can start by analyzing your web site through the Google PageSpeed Insights service and follow their guidelines.
10. You are building incoming links too fast
I am not a big fan of the term ‘link building’. In fact, I don’t even like to hear it, I like to use the term promotion instead.
Nevertheless, the reality is the same. Whether you call it link building, off-page SEO or promotion, it is one of the most important SEO processes, if you want to achieve high rankings.
When build links avoid making these SEO mistakes:
- Don’t build too many links too fast. The whole process needs to be natural and it is not natural for a 3-month website to have tens of links pointing to it. Go slow and steady.
- Don’t use keyword anchor text links. In the near past keyword anchor text links were very important for rankings, but now if you have many of those you can get a penalty instead.
- Don’t direct all your links to your home page. Diversification is a better practice.
- Don’t buy or exchange links with other bloggers and don’t participate in any link scheme (either free or paid).
Pro Tip: If link building is a new concept for you, read my previous guide: What are backlinks
11. You are building low quality links
If you ask anyone who is outside the SEO industry ‘what is SEO’, they will most probably tell you that:
- You need to create a page
- Add the keywords you want to rank for
- Build incoming links to those pages.
While this used to be a common SEO tactic of the past, it’s not the way today to get a page in the top positions of Google today.
The problem with using such techniques is that Google no longer tolerates link building that has no other value than passing ‘link juice’ from one page to another.
Their updated quality guidelines state clearly that any type of links build for this purpose are against their guidelines and may lead to a penalty.
In particular they talk about:
- Guest posting with keyword-rich text links
- Guest posting on article directories
- Bookmark site links
- Forum commenting with optimized links (either in the post or signature)
- Paid advertorials or advertising
- Cross linking or link exchanges
Does this mean that link building is dead? Absolutely not. Google was the first search engine that came up with the idea that a link is a ‘vote’ of trust and that websites with the highest number of links should rank better than websites with lesser links; and this worked great for them for many years.
They actually did several tests for removing links from being an important ranking factor but they concluded that the quality of the results is better with the incoming links considered.
Besides Google, Yandex also started using links as part of their ranking algorithm and so does Bing and Yahoo.
So, how do you build links that matter without getting into trouble?
First you need to make sure that your website and content are of good quality and professional.
Trusted websites don’t link to any website so before even trying to look for link building opportunities make sure that you are proud of your website and content.
Second, build your personal social media brand. When applying to guest post on big websites one of the things they look is your social media profiles.
You have more chances of being accepted if you are active in social media with a good number of followers rather than having a poor social media presence.
Third, make connections with people that can help you get a guest posting position. It’s easier if you are recommended by someone who is already publishing content than applying alone.
Fourth, you need to be ready to show samples of your published work (besides your blog). If you want to publish your content on good websites you will have to show them examples of your work published on other sites.
12. You are creating pages for SEO purposes only
Web sites that have more pages in the index rank higher than websites with less pages, correct? Not necessarily.
Websites that have a lot of quality pages indexed will rank higher and not just any type of pages.
Pages with thin content, duplicate content or repeating content do not add value to a website, they actually harm a website’s SEO performance.
If you are aim is getting as many pages you can indexed in Google, you may have to stop and revise your SEO Strategy.
In a typical website, category, archive, tag and pages that do not have unique content should be set to ‘noindex’.
This will most probably reduce the number of indexed pages but it is a more optimized approach and will help your website in the long term.
Instead of trying to duplicate your pages, concentrate on creating pages with valuable content that have more chances of ranking on their own.
Use canonical URLS and page directives for pages that need to be present for navigation purposes or useful to users.
Pro Tip: Learn how to find and fix low quality pages and improve your website’s overall quality.
13. You are using press releases for building links
I did not mention press releases above, because I wanted to give it more attention.
Some people still believe that adding links to press releases and distributing them through various channels will help SEO.
This is a bad tactic that should be avoided. Google with the latest release of Panda wanted to pass the message that press releases do not help SEO and they did it in the most obvious way.
Should you stop using press releases? Not at all, there are still benefits from using press releases as a promotion channel but you need to ensure that any links in the press release are ‘nofollow’.
14. You are targeting high traffic keywords only
The first thing that many SEO experts do when trying to optimize a website is a keyword research. So far so good.
The mistake they are doing is that they only consider high volume keywords because they believe that this way they will get more traffic.
High traffic keywords are highly competitive and if you are starting out now (or have a relatively new website) you will never rank for those keywords, at least not in this life.
I am exaggerating so as to give you an idea of how difficult is to go after high traffic keywords with a ‘normal’ website.
What you should do instead?
There is a lot of traffic that is easier to target on long-tail keywords.
Long tail keywords as their name implies are search queries with more than 2+ words. For example, here is a high traffic keyword “SEO tips” and a long-tail keyword “SEO tips for beginners”.
To use this technique, you need to know how to find long tail keywords, but for sure is a method that works and can generate traffic for all kinds of websites.
15. You have separated SEO from your overall digital marketing strategy
For successful SEO these days, you need to do more than just SEO. SEO needs the help of social media, content marketing, mobile marketing and all other tools available in a digital marketing arsenal.
If your tactic is to concentrate only on SEO you will not go far.
It is necessary to go beyond SEO and create a digital marketing strategy rather an SEO strategy alone.
Use traditional SEO techniques to optimize your website and content but for promotion purposes think outside the box and don’t be afraid to try things.
Don’t always try to think of ways to get more links but on ways to get more traffic and the links will naturally follow.
16. You are not using the <H1> tag correctly
This is a bit technical but easy to understand. When the Google crawler is reading a web page, it uses several techniques in order to interpret what a page is about.
The title as I already mentioned is a great signal, but also is the H1 tag.
The mistake that many websites make is that in a given page, they use more than one H1 tags.
This may be due to the website theme that is not SEO optimized or to bad programming, but the bottom line is that this is confusing for the search engine bots.
The easiest way to check if your website has this problem, is to visit a page on your site and select VIEW SOURCE from the browser menu.
This will show you the HTML code of the page and then you can search for “H1” using the FIND menu.
If there are more than 2 occurrences of opening H1 tags (<H1>), then this means you have a problem.
In case you do have more than H1 tags and don’t know how to fix it, you can ask a programmer to make this change for you.
17. You are not formatting your content
It is very common to see pages that have only text content in the main area without proper headings, paragraphing or any work done on styling.
This is not only bad for the user experience but also something that search engines can understand and if this is a repeating phenomenon it leads to the devaluation of a website’s quality.
When you publish text on a webpage don’t just paste the text (even if it is unique and original) on the page but try to make the page look nice by using headings (H2, H3), bold and italics to help users read and interact with the page.
Many people think that this does not matter since Google cannot ‘see’ a page but it is important for them as well.
In an article titled “building high quality websites” published in 2011, they mention that styling, quality control and editing is an important factor when trying to differentiate between high and low quality websites.
18. Your images are not SEO optimized
Images make pages more interesting to read and shareable.
Common mistakes associated with the use of images are:
- Using images that are too big in file size – this makes the website slower to load especially on mobile devices (not to mention the bandwidth needed to download big images on mobile).
- Using too many images – Unless you are a fashion news website, you don’t have to overload a page with images.
- Not using ALT text – ALT tags help search engines understand what an image is about and not using alt text makes their job much more difficult.
Image SEO Best Practices
Optimize your image file size before publishing. If you have a large image (i.e 2400×1200) don’t publish it as it is.
Use any photo editing software to ‘cut’ the image to a reasonable size i.e. 800×600 and then ‘Export it for Web’ so that the file size is optimized.
Any modern photo editing software like photoshop or pixelmator has many options for minimizing an image file size without losing quality.
If you need to use a lot of images on a page, don’t add them to the full size but use thumbnails to show smaller versions of the images and if users when to see the biggest version they can click on the thumbnail.
Before adding an image to a page make sure that you use a descriptive ALT text.
The alt text does not need to be separated by ‘-’ but you can use plain text. To make your ALT text more SEO optimized, make sure that it includes some of your main keywords but without keyword stuffing.
More SEO Mistakes
These are the top SEO mistakes people make over and over again.
The bottom line is that most of them are very easy to avoid. All you have to do is go through the list and make the necessary fixes.
Which of the above SEO mistakes are the most popular? Are there any other common errors missing from the list?
The Google Keyword tool only seems to be available now if you’re paying for AdWords. Any suggestions for other possibilities here?
very nice post
and helpfull simple trick
Thanks Ajay!
Thanx for such a precise and important info…….
Great work……
Hi Alex,
This was nice article and straight approach for getting better for our websites, also waiting for your new as mentioned. Does bloggers blogspot is excluded from ranking from first page because I do not see mine not even others who are ranking from Blogspot, what is the issue on this.
Really very useful for baby blogger…
Thanks
Thanks Lalit, Glad I could help!
Alex
Hi Alex,
Okay, I can’t deny the #10 part. I got hit by Hummingbird and Penguin 2.1 due to that. I was having too many links coming in even though it is natural. Basically, Google seems too many link building over time as a chance of spamming. Of course, after two weeks of being hit (between 7- 14 days) traffic hit back and everything is back to business.
Moral of the story: Don’t build them too fast! Haha
Thanks mate.
Reginald
Hi Alex:
A great 10 pack of sound, useful SEO tips for both beginners and veterans alike.
I have a feeling that many people will be feeling the wrath of Hummingbird before too long.
#Hummingbird
The Google Keyword tool only seems to be available now if you’re paying for AdWords. Any suggestions for other possibilities here?
Hi Adam
The Google keyword tool (www.google.com/sktool) is free, you only need to have an Adwords account but you don’t have to be running any paid campaigns. Hope this helps.
Thanks
Alex
What a great article Alex. Very helpful tips. In terms of page loading speed, does the plugins and images affect it?
Hi Alex,
I think I have to start reading all your blog posts not just the new ones, because by doing this I can be an SEO expert like you.
I want to purchase The Complete WordPress SEO Guide also, but unfortunately, my Ccard has some technical problem and still have to contact the issuing bank.
Jaime
Great tips Alex. It is helpful for every webmaster. I like your writing style, easy to read. Thanks for sharing.
Hello Alex,
I have a question. If I am doing SEO for a very new site, how much duration should I wait to start building link? Any specific number (like 6months, 8 months) would be much helpful 🙂
Thanks!
Hi Sabina
You should start link building after you have good content on your website. Read this for more info: https://www.reliablesoft.net/seo-new-website/
Hope this helps
Alex
Hi Alex
Thanks for the great tips! I’m new to online marketing, and this is really helpful! Since getting started, I’ve been bombarded by “spin writers” and such to create a TON of content quickly, but you seem to say that these search engines have become sophisticated enough to determine when your content is crap. Am I understanding that right?
Pretty cool article. I did well in ensuring that I saved it to my pocket app since it’s pretty useful, especially for subsequent years to come. I’m not into On-page SEO at the moment. I practice it when I can but I am really into building links (Off-page SEO). If you can compose an article about Link building that would be GREAT!
Great article.
Hi Samantha
Thanks for your comment. On-Page SEO is the safest way to start building some good rankings online especially with Google but definitely an article on off page SEO is something I plan to publish really soon so stay tuned…
Thanks
Alex
This post was good and you mentioned above all the points of on page mistakes. Hope this guide will help newbies. Keep writing good contents like this. Thank you!
Hi Romjan
Thanks for the nice comment, I hope too that it will help beginners to SEO
Alex
Thank you for such a clear and well written article. As a beginner in SEO it’s refreshing to be able to follow the advise given in plain English with the minimum of geek speak. Looking forward to more great info.
Hi Paul
Thanks a lot for commenting. That was exactly the purpose, to help beginners avoid these 5 common SEO mistakes.
Thanks
I passed today’s SEO test…. waiting for your next lesson.
Great! Stay tuned…
Hi Alex, I like your articles, they are so help for beginners, professionals and enterpreuners. I have 1 question, you had written that Don’t use H1 tag more than 1 time,
What about h2 and h3 tags ?
Can we use h2 and h3 tags more than once or nor.
Hi Harmandeep
Yes we can use h2 and h3 tags more than once. Think of it like a book where a chapter has one title (h1) and then several sections (h2 0r h3)
Hope this helps
Alex
Greatly appreciate your straight forward translation from geek to layman: stoked how much I’m learning, thanks Alex, nice one. Wishing for you juicy crunchy apples 😉
Thanks a lot! SEO is simple if you stick to the basic rules and avoid exaggerations.
Thanks for commenting.
This is really amazing article. When I learn to rank website, My tutor teach me to submit press release to the websites!
I was confused because many of the people are suggesting not to use press release for link-building. I research a lot but get a mix of opinions.
Finally, I read your content and now I understand, why I should not use the press release for my website. Its all about Google Update!
Thanks for the info man!
Hi Alex
Indeed a great post about SEO mistakes.
According to me, Search engine optimization is something which can make our future If we do it the right way.
You have listed most common seo mistakes which almost every blogger is doing.
In order to rank instantly in SERPs, people are trying un-ethical SEO strategies like keyword stuffing, building low quality or spam links.
Keyword stuffing is the most common and worst SEO mistake I have ever seen. People think that filling the article with so many keywords will help them to rank fast.
But It is wrong, Nowadays Google is very much strict for such webmasters and rolling regular updates to kill these webmaster’s work.
Copying articles from other site is also a most common seo mistake and I had also did this mistake when I started my blogging carrier But now I have completely avoided it.
I am completely against keyword stuffing and copying content.
Thanks for listing all the mistakes here so that people can learn about these mistakes and can try to avoid them. 😀
Hello,
Well, Greatly described points about SEO mistakes, we make or have made in our past.
When it started my career in blogging, the only thing I know, was writing article and building links, but majority of my articles were full of keywords and the links I was building was just spam links with optimized anchor texts.
Also, I was not aware of internal links important, but with time everything has improved and these days, I rarely make any SEO mistake.
But, still a huge number of newbies are making these mistakes and I sadly say, that they are wasting their valuable time.
So, considering this, a brilliant post written, it will help many out there, searching for this.
Keep up the good work.
Cheers.
Hi Rubel
Thanks for your comment. We all make mistakes in SEO especially in the beginning when we are anxious to get results as fast as possible. I wrote this post so that newbies will not make the same mistakes.
Thanks
Alex
Very interesting article! As someone who just started blogging, unfortunately I made the mistake of falling into the “buying backlinks is a great idea” mindset. Naturally, now I’m panicking. I think in total there were probably 100 links made over a month or two, all of which were apparently “High PR 7-9”, then about 300 wiki links (truthfully I don’t even know what that is). Do you think this will have a negative affect on my site? I’ve noticed some of my top ranking articles have disappeared from google, but I’m pretty sure that’s due to a webmaster tools error I made (making errors left and right). If the backlinks do end up having a negative effect, is that effect permanent, or how does that usually work?
Hi Sebastian
Without knowing all the details I can tell you that it will definitely have a negative impact on your website. Your articles disappeared from Google because of a penalty and not because of errors in webmaster tools. The effect is not permanent but you will have to take actions to recover from it. I suggest you read this: https://www.reliablesoft.net/how-to-check-if-your-website-is-penalized-by-google-364/.
In my ebook I have a whole chapter dedicated to link building and how to approach it correctly for new and older websites. In short, everything you do should be without exaggerations and without buying or participating in link exchange schemes.
Hope this helps
Alex
Thanks for sharing this valuable content.
However, it is very easy to do On-page SEO. because these are the things that are in our control and as the time passes webmaster become more familiar with on-page SEO terms.
but off-page SEO is very important to develop a great background which indicates that the content of the website is very important for the audience.
But I am a little bit worry about off-page SEO.
I am writing a good piece of content but I am unable to build the network with the audience. I am unable to generate traffic. what do I need to do?. please help me.
Thank you, sir
Hey,
regarding #1. I heard rumors the keyword tool will be made exclusively available if you pay for a campaign. In case this happens, do you have alternative tools?
Cheers
Hi Marc
It’s not rumours, if you don’t have active campaigns in Adwords, the keyword tool does not show all the details for specific keywords. It shows you the total search volume for related keywords grouped together.
I personally use Semrush.
Thanks for the info, I am continuously following your posts and applied the same on my personal website and got good results, I am new to seo, you may have look on my website and tell me whether there is anything to improve. Thanks.
Hi Alex!
Great article! Thanks for writing and sharing this info. Your articles are so full of very helpful and useful tips! Just thought you should know that it is REALLY appreciated!
M. Collins