Common SEO Mistakes That Destroy Your Rankings

With stiff competition being faced by bloggers and small businesses alike, many bloggers and web masters are using different search engine optimisation techniques in the hope of driving more much needed traffic to their blogs and websites. While some become successful, others commit serious SEO mistakes that end up messing up their businesses and even personal finances. The following are the 5 common SEO mistakes that can destroy the ranking of a site:

1. Creating Low Quality, Duplicate, or Spammy Content

Producing low quality, spammy, or duplicate content not only shows lack professionalism, but is also a way of putting off potential visitors. Content is the foundation of any SEO campaign, the foundation on which your ranings are built. Unique, high-quality content not only converts more visitors to enquiries, it attracts links of it’s own merrit and is much easier to rank.

2. Paying for Links

Link buying has a lot of disadvantages and very few advantages for the rankings of your site. Apart from being easy to replicate, paid links are easy to identify and can therefore lead to penalisation by Google. Its easy for a competitor to go through you inbound link profile and report a list of paid links to Google via web master tools, so with that in mind, is it really worth paying for them in the first place? To be safe, it is important for you to work on building your own links by creating unique, high-quality, and highly-informative content capable of attracting more visitors.

3. Hiding Text (Cloaking)

Cloaking is one of the darkest and ill advised techniques that you can ever apply to your SEO. It is a form of deceiving readers and search engines, by showing each a different version of your page. this makes cloaking a serious violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The only way to protect your site’s ranking is by adhering to all guidelines stipulated by Google, and even then Google have been known to “move the goal posts” without warning.

4. Overusing Commercial Anchor Texts

When used carefully, commercial anchor texts can be very beneficial to any site. Apart from increasing a site’s credibility, anchor texts also play a major role in providing visitors with more vital information. Overusing the anchor texts is now very unhealthy to SEO, as since the launch of Google’s penguin update, it can lead to heavy “aggressive seo” penalties from Google. Therefore, as much as you would like to use anchor texts, avoid overdoing it.

5. Omitting Keyword Research

The way you use your keywords determined whether your site will be given a high or low rank by the search engines. Therefore, before you even start writing your content or building your site, you should do thorough research on the keyword or keywords you intend to use. Failure to do this, you might end up coming up with a poor and unreliable site.

This guest post was written by Nick Davison, Nick is the lead SEO consultant at High Impact SEO, an award winning company based in Leeds.