15 SEO Mistakes Bloggers and Webmasters should avoid

Today, i’ll be sharing the top SEO mistakes that all webmasters and bloggers should avoid. This will help their websites to get high rankings, have low bounce rate and will keep high quality natural links flowing to the site.

List of 15 SEO Mistakes that should be avoided

Purchasing 1000’s of links:You may have seen a lot of people that offer link building services for a price ranging from as low as 5$ and high as 100$. Well, if you’re one of them then you should stop it right now as you’re making websites eligible to be penalized by Google. If you’re a webmaster thinking to get 100’s of links pointing at your site within a short period of time then you should rethink your strategy as you’re violation Google webmaster guidelines.

Selling Links that pass Google page rank: This is not a good Idea either. If you’re a webmaster or blogger who sells footer or sidebar links that passes page rank then you should stop this right now as you’re violating Google webmaster guidelines. Many bloggers commit this mistake in a greed to earn money online.

Linking to poor quality websites: Many newbie bloggers follow bad SEO guides that suggest their followers to visit a do follow blog and drop their comment. Bloggers in a greed to get a link back successful executes this suggestion without knowing whether the website that hosts the comment is performing well in search results. If in case comment has been left on a Google blacklisted or penalized website then the blogger has bad days ahead. This is one of the most common SEO mistake bloggers and webmasters commit.

Using a nulled WordPress or Blogger theme/ template:Such type of templates hosts hidden links that the user of it may not know of. Whether these links point to high quality of poor websites, hidden links are bad for the websites health. Even if there are no such links embedded in the site’s code, using nulled WordPress or blogger template is a not a good idea. The developers include a license with a theme/ template. If any user violates this license then the developer can report the site to Google DMCA.

Not fixing broken links on the website: Ignoring internal and external links that generate 404 errors on a site is the worst SEO mistake that webmasters commit. These errors can be easily detected by tool called as Xenu Link Sleuth. If you’re running a WordPress site then the broken link checker does an excellent job of detecting and handling them.

Using no-follow internal links:This not only negates the page rank that passes to the links but is also a bad SEO practice. Watch this video on what Matt cutts have to say about no follow internal links :

Copying content from other websites: This a mistake committed by newbie bloggers. Sites with duplicate websites are called scrappers and are penalized by Google. Having a good site structure not only decreases the bounce rate but also gives better user experience to the visitors.

Not having a good site structure:- Google search engine has been recently updated with the Page layout algorithm. A site with poor structure that doesn’t have content for users above the page fold are affected by this module.

Not checking for bad pages indexed in Google: Google Panda module refresh affects websites that have thin pages/ posts indexed in the search engine’s database. Many websites allow tag, labels, category pages to be indexed. On WordPress, yoast SEO plugin takes care of this by allowing tag, category and date archives to have a noindex robots meta tag.

Using software to build backlinks: Search engine like Google is very smart to detect backlinks that are generated through a software. If Google finds any such link back, then the site is penalized. In a greed to get quick links, many bloggers and webmasters commit this SEO mistake and gets their site penalized by Google.

Having too many ads on the site: To earn extra money online, many webmasters put too many ads on their sites. In my perspective, this creates a negative impression on the visitor and results in high bonce rate as people wont explore the site further.

Submitting website to poor quality directory: If a Blogger does this mistake then he/ she is violating the Google webmaster guidelines. Most of the paid or free to submit link web directories have been banned by Google. Hence, before you submit a website to a directory, make sure that get details on its page rank, search engine position.

Using bad social book-marking sites: The above point applies to all the social bookmarking sites too.

Not having a Google webmaster tools account: One of the most important online and free SEO tool is the GWT. This tool from Google has a lot of inbuilt modules that shows various errors and site related problems. Google webmaster tool has backlink checker, search keywords, page impressions, structured data testing modules. These useful utilities helps the webmasters to improve the sites search engine visibility.

Using keywords: On page keyword density should not be more than 5% and the content or the content should not be stuffed with it. If the keyword density of the content is more than 4.5 or 5 percent, it note only makes the article difficult to read. Many bloggers and webmasters commit the SEO mistake of stuffing similar words in the meta keywords tag. Although this tag is not considered by popular search engines like Bing and Google, the keywords stuffed in it further increases the density. This can make the website eligible for a over optimization penalty on the next Google Panda update/ refresh.

Not optimizing title and meta description tags: Improving title and page’s meta description is one of the most important on page SEO optimization technique. As these 2 are the only page elements that an user sees in the search engine results, you should make sure that the title tags are clean and includes all the necessary keywords that you want the page to be ranked for. The title tag should be unique on each page and should have more than 1 relevant punctuation mark. If the tags are not unique on each pages the you’ll see duplicate title/ meta description error in the HTML improvements section of your Google webmaster tool account. The max length of this tag should not be more than 70 characters (including your brand name). The same technique applies for the description tag whose max length is of 160 characters. If you’re not doing on Page SEO optimization of these 2 HTML elements then you’re committing a SEO mistake.