Avoid these SEO mistakes

I have been doing SEO on my website for the past 2 years. I did not have any success, just a little, and I want you to learn from my mistakes ...

The first mistake that I did was targeting the wrong keywords. I hired an SEO firm to work on my website. The first step we took was keyword research. I did not know a lot back then, so I let the firm to choose a couple of non-competitive and some competitive keywords for me. The mistake was that they were not relevant to the website, well maybe the website, but not the page it was optimized for. Here is what happened ...

My website is about funny pictures, and the firm suggested that I optimize the homepage for the keyword [funny pictures without captions]. But the page, which was the homepage, was not relevant. I did not know then that it was a bad idea, so I went for it. Instead, I should've went for the keyword [funny pictures]. I know that it is a hard keyword to rank for, but you should always target relevant keywords. And here is why ...

The problem is that when you target a keyword that's not relevant, it might be easier to rank for these keyword, initially, but no one is going to click on your result, because simply it's not relevant to what they're searching for.

The second mistake was too many low quality backlinks. What I mean by low quality is links from directories and websites that give out links easily. My second SEO firm built a lot of junk links. They were worthless, literally. To give you a better picture, the firm built about 500 links from internet directories that no one have ever visited my website from, so no referral traffic. These low quality links took my website from the second page of my targeted keyword, which was at the time [funny pictures with captions], to the forth page in less than two weeks. They were building a lot of spamy links. And so I lift them for another SEO company.

The third mistake I did was building exact match links. What are these you may ask? Well it's links containing your targeting keyword. So for instance, if you were targeting [funny pictures website] you build links with that keyword. this may help you with ranking, but if abused can penalize you from the SEs. The best amount is no more than 3 exact match links. I heard Matt Cutts, head of Google spam team say that the more you use exact matched links the more your rankings will drop until it's not even in the results of that keyword.

Here you have it. The three biggest SEO mistakes that I think can hurt your business.
You can add more mistakes to this list from your experience for other people.

Regards,
Farris

 

A few week back I have wrote a post about top 5 worst SEO mistakes that business are still doing. And this also applies in 2017. You can check that post at kuldeepbisht.com/blog/5-worst-seo-mistakes-businesses-still/

I'm sure you'll get some idea of the worst seo mistakes ever.