Beginners in 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. Thus, staying educated and informed about the latest SEO developments is important.
In this post, you will read about the most common SEO mistakes to avoid and what to do instead.
14 SEO Mistakes To Avoid
- Not Doing Keyword Research
- Not Writing Unique Page Titles And Descriptions
- Not Using Webmaster Tools
- Not Promoting Your Content
- Publishing Low-Quality Content
- Not Optimizing Your Images
- Not Optimizing Your H1 Tag
- Not Having An Overall Digital Marketing Strategy
- Targeting Keywords That Are Too Competitive
- Having a Slow Website
- Building Backlinks Too Fast
- Building Low-Quality Links
- Using Internal Links Wrongly
- Not Formatting Your Content
1. Not Doing Keyword Research
Some people believe that using a keyword research tool before creating their content is somehow cheating. This is nowhere close to the truth, it is a big SEO mistake.
A keyword research tool like Semrush or the Google Keyword Tool will indicate 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. Not Writing Unique Page Titles And Descriptions
This is probably the biggest SEO mistake, and despite the emphasis given by both Google and Bing, some webmasters still do not provide unique titles for each page.
The title of a page is a very important SEO signal. Search engines and users first read this when they try to understand what a page is about.
If you fail to provide them with a meaningful title, you will minimize your chances of ranking high on Google (and other search engines). In addition, you will drive visitors away from your webpage.
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 a maximum of 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 must also be attractive to the user to receive more clicks.
Not proving a meta description.
Another SEO mistake is not to provide a unique meta description for every page.
A good meta description can increase your click-through rates (CTR), and if your content delivers what is promised in the description, it is more likely to increase your conversion rate as well.
Descriptions should be unique (150-160 characters), non-keyword stuffed, and attractive to the user.
3. Not Using 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 webmaster tools to help website owners learn 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.
4. Not Promoting Your Content
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 will not 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 the 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 on an authoritative website and link to your post.
5. Publishing Low-Quality Content
The 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
6. Not Optimizing Your Images
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 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.
Optimize your image file size before publishing. If you have a large image (i.e., 2400x1200), don’t publish it as it is. Use photo editing software to ‘cut’ the image to a reasonable size, i.e., 800x600, and then ‘Export it for Web’ to optimize the file size.
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 many 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 want to see the biggest version, they can click on the thumbnail.
Before adding an image to a page, use 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, ensure it includes some of your main keywords without keyword stuffing.
7. Not Optimizing Your H1 Tag
This is a bit technical but easy to understand. When the Google crawler is reading a web page, it uses several techniques to interpret what a page is about.
As I already mentioned, the title is an excellent signal and so is the H1 tag.
The mistake that many websites make is that they use more than one H1 tag on a given page. This may be due to the website theme not being SEO optimized or 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 and select VIEW SOURCE from the browser menu.
This will show you the page's HTML code, and then you can search for “H1” using the FIND menu.
If there are more than 2 occurrences of opening H1 tags (<H1>), you have a problem.
If you have more than H1 tags and don’t know how to fix them, you can ask a programmer to make this change.
8. Not Having An Overall Digital Marketing Strategy
For successful SEO, 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 than 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 think of ways to get more links, but of ways to get more traffic, and the links will naturally follow.
9. Targeting Keywords That Are Too Competitive
The first thing many SEO experts do when optimizing a website is keyword research. So far, so good. The mistake they are making 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 now (or have a relatively new website), you will never rank for those keywords, at least not in this life.
What should you do instead?
A lot of traffic is easier to target on long-tail keywords.
As their name implies, long tail keywords 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 it is a method that works and can generate traffic for all kinds of websites.
10. Having a Slow Website
It is really a crime not to take advantage of speed as a ranking factor. If there is one factor that we know affects your ranking position, it is page speed.
Google and Bing want to make the web faster, and they are doing everything possible 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 to ignore it.
A faster website will bring more traffic (due to higher rankings) and will generate more sales and more page views.
If you run ads on your website (like AdSense), a faster website will generate more ad clicks and revenue.
How to improve the loading time of your website?
You basically have 2 options. The first one is outsourcing this task to a professional team and letting 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, read this guide.
11. Building Backlinks 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 to achieve high rankings.
When building links, avoid making these SEO mistakes:
- Don’t build too many backlinks 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 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 or participate in any link scheme (free or paid).
12. Building Low-Quality Links
If you ask anyone who is outside the SEO industry ‘what SEO is’, 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 links built 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 comments 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 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, as did Bing and Yahoo.
So, how do you build links that matter without getting into trouble?
- First, you must ensure that your website and content are of good quality and are professional.
- Trusted websites don’t link to any website, so before even looking for link-building opportunities, make sure you are proud of your website and content.
- Second, build your personal social media brand. When applying to guest posts on big websites, one of the things they look at is your social media profiles.
- You have more chances of being accepted if you are active on social media with many followers rather than having a poor social media presence.
- Third, connect with people who can help you get a guest posting position. It’s easier if you are recommended by someone already publishing content than applying alone.
- Fourth, you must be ready to show samples of your published work (besides your blog). If you want to publish your content on good websites,, you must show them examples of your work published on other sites.
13. Using Internal Links Wrongly
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 website owners don’t even bother making internal links either because they believe it’s a waste of time or because they are unaware that internal links are good for SEO.
What is internal linking?
Internal linking is when you link from one page to another on the same website.
Internal links are great for SEO since they allow you to create your own small web by linking your pages. This helps search engines discover or revisit pages from your website and gives users extra information 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 often mentioned that webmasters should pay attention to internal links because it helps them navigate a website better.
- Make the links descriptive and avoid using anchor text like “click here,” “these,” or other words that do not help Google and users understand what the linking page is about.
- Don’t use tag clouds - this is a bad practice for internal links.
- Add the internal links within the page's main text (not in the sidebar) when possible.
- Don’t always use keywords in the anchor text; 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. This is hard, but you must add this task to your schedule.
- Ensure 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).
14. Not Formatting Your Content
It is very common to see pages with only text content in the main area without proper headings, paragraphing, or any styling work done.
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.
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?
