Search engine optimization can be pretty complicated – especially if you’re new to it. While it’s nowhere near as difficult and technical as some ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ would have you believe, the learning curve can still be fairly steep. Truth be told, there’s a very good chance that – unless you’re some sort of seasoned expert yourself – you’ve made a bunch of mistakes optimizing your website.
Don’t get too bummed out about that, though. After all, making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn, right? The first step, of course, is knowing that you messed up in the first place.
To that end, here are a few of the lesser-known mistakes many webmasters tend to make when optimizing their site.
You’re Not Mixing Things Up With Your Titles And Descriptions
While I understand that there are only so many ways to describe a product, service, or brand, you need to ensure that you keep your title tags and meta descriptions as unique as possible. Duplicate content is a serious no-no where optimization is concerned, and Google has a long history of penalizing websites – often severely – for hosting it. You need to make sure all content on your website is unique, including the descriptive elements.
Local Search Isn’t On Your Radar
Here’s an interesting statistic for you to chew on – according to Google, four in five consumers use search engines to find local products, services, or experiences. Not only that, the vast majority of these searches lead to some form of action. Someone looking up movie times, for example, will likely proceed to visit a theater. What all of this means is simple: if you aren’t at least placing a passing focus on local search results in your SEO efforts, you’re probably missing out on a big chunk of traffic.
Your Traffic Sources Aren’t Diverse Enough
You might be surprised to learn that you’re actually going to end up hurting your site if you focus exclusively on drawing traffic from a single source. You need to pull visitors from – and foster awareness through – every avenue you can. This includes social media likes and shares, search, brand mentions, and affiliate links.
You’ve Made A Website That Can’t Be Crawled
Google’s “robots” read through your website and determine its ultimate ranking by ‘crawling’ it – something they can’t do if your website is too expansive or complex. When mapping out your website, go by the “rule of three” – meaning that no page on your site is more than three clicks away from your homepage. This’ll allow search engines to access every page – and prevent you from missing out on any traffic.
You Think Ranking Is The Sole Measure Of Success
There was a time – not too long ago, as a matter of fact – where your search engine ranking was the sole determining factor in whether or not your website was a success. Today, that’s no longer the case. Although you shouldn’t discount search engine traffic, it shouldn’t be the only thing you aim for when optimizing your website – especially because no one save Google really certain exactly how it’s determined(and anyone who claims they know is probably lying). I’d even go so far as to say that your site’s ranking should be the least of your concerns when you’re optimizing your website.
Instead, you should simply focus on creating a great website with awesome content. A well-written, valuable article can be easily optimized after it’s been put together, but no amount of optimization will save a spun, poorly written trash-bin piece.
Learning From Your Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes at one time or another. What separates success from failure is the capacity to learn from those mistakes, and use them to adapt one’s approach.That applies to every field – not just search engine optimization.