We cover a range of online marketing topics here on Return On Now, with SEO being one of our favorites to discuss and review.
Today we offer you a guest post from Samantha Nicole Samonte of Singapore-based online marketing services provider Webcada. In this post, she covers some basic SEO gaffs that no one should be making these days. It’s a nice refresher for experienced webmasters and a good introductory piece for newcomers.
Search engine optimization is considered the holy grail of online marketing. How you make use of it can easily spell out the fate of your business.
Circumstances became even more challenging when Google decided to launch Panda and Penguin to go after the websites working their way around credible and reliable SEO.
So what are the biggest SEO mistakes you can make? Below are a few of them to avoid.
Prioritizing Search Engines Over Users
There are some SEO practitioners who focus too much on getting high ranks, so much that they overlook the users they’re primarily targeting.
This is a big “no-no”, since they’re practically unable to provide quality content. All they’re doing is enhancing their pages with useless links, invisible pages and abused keywords— all of which are known black hat techniques.
Lack of Social Media Integration
While social networking sites are not the only online marketing that should be used, the lack of it is a big SEO mistake.
If your website or blog doesn’t have the option of sharing your content through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or Pinterest, then you’re lowering the chances of your page being seen online. Social media has the power to share a tremendous amount of information to a big audience in a short period of time. Might as well make use of it, right?
Senseless Blog Commenting
Commenting effectively on different blogs can drive traffic to your site. It can create quality back links that help position your website better on the web.
Recently, however, there are a lot of blog bashers who comment in posts with completely unrelated links and answers. For example: A real estate company advertising their newest houses for rent in a women’s fashion blog. Plain and simply, this practice is spam that reduces the credibility of the commenter as a reliable business.
Use, Misuse and Abuse of Keywords
Keywords play an integral part of an effective and reliable SEO strategy. If you’re able to formulate the right keywords or key phrases, it can be of great benefit to your business.
However, blindly chasing keywords is not the answer. Many SEOs deliberately use, misuse and abuse their keywords in order to get to the top 10 search results in Google. Moreover, they don’t think about where the best position of their keywords should be. They just lay it on like pepperoni on a pizza.
The result of such efforts is disappointing, because it dumbs down the quality of the content and compromises the user experience.
Absence of a Sitemap
Sitemaps are very effective tools for improving your ranking on Google.
The absence of a site map means crawlers won’t be able to easily see just how detailed and useful your website is. These bots often will not take time to randomly crawl various websites. What you need to do is have an XML-based glossary of pages with informative titles and URLs, so the crawlers can easily see what your website is all about.
Summary
Search engine optimization is comprised of doing legitimate, reliable and successful business online. So before you make your next move, keep in mind these possible mistakes that you should not take part in.
Samantha Nicole Samonte is a Content Specialist for Webcada, a SEO Singapore Company. She spends the rest of her time guest-blogging for various websites.
Tommy Landry
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