Having a website has become a must over the recent years. It is the gateway for your customers to know and understand you and your business. A good website which is optimized for Search Engines to easily find and index can help extend the reach of your brand to thousands of new customers. This is something that every website owner should focus on. The technique of Optimizing the content on your website to make it easier for Search Engines to index it is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO focusses on figuring out the content that your potential customers are searching for on the internet and then using that information to create relevant content. This makes your site much more relevant to people who visit it and can hence improve your site’s authority in their minds. However, there are certain common mistakes that have to be avoided, when you do SEO for your site. Let us take a look at a few of those.
Not Optimizing Images:
Images are all links. This is one of those important concepts that every webmaster has to understand. Since images are links, you have to realize that any image that you put on your site can lead people to your site. How? Simple, through image search. Let’s say someone searches for an image of a particular Vacuum Cleaner on Google Image Search and finds an image from your site. They might click on the image and reach your site about vacuum cleaners!
However, for this to work, you need to optimize your images with proper tags and titles. How will Google Images know that that particular image on your site was that of a washing machine? It won’t, unless you title the image as a washing machine and write a description on the alt tag for that image.
Keyword Stuffing:
Back in the day, SEO was all about inserting the keyword you are trying to rank for, several times into the text. However, Google has become smarter over the years and doing this now, will not just affect your search rankings, but also get you penalized by Google. Hence, it is a mistake that definitely needs to be avoided.
Bad Internal Linking:
When creating a website (this great tool), it is easy to forget that you need to link to your pages internally so that none of the pages are orphaned, i.e., without any links pointing to them. This type of bad internal linking needs to be avoided at all costs as it can negatively affect our site’s SEO efforts.