SEO can be a huge headache to copywriters, especially if you don’t understand the intricacies and strategies it takes to really make it work. There’s not much that’s more frustrating than spending your valuable time working on SEO only to see no effects at all in your website traffic.
There are three common mistakes that many SEO first-timers make fairly regularly. If you can keep an eye out for these mistakes in your own SEO efforts, you’ll save a lot of time and will have effective SEO copy pulling in more traffic than ever.
Your Site Isn’t Crawl-able
Google implements what are known as “web crawlers” to index and locate certain pages. If you aren’t using great headlines, keywords and relevant content, you are making your page hard to find and, thus, not optimized to be caught by these web crawlers. This can also be blamed on poorly written page descriptions.
You can keep tabs on this by navigating your own site. Make sure you are able to reach every page within your site through Google search results. You’ll need to clock on Google’s listing of your site and select the “text only version.”
Your Keywords Are Weak
Be sure that your keywords are relevant and related to what people want to read about. If you have weak keywords, your content is going to get lost in the millions of other websites out there. You need to be very specific. For instance, if you are writing an article on the depth of the Grand Canyon, using “depth of the Grand Canyon” isn’t quite enough. You need to specify your keyphrase like “How deep is the Grand Canyon?”
A general rule of thumb is to think about the phrases or words you would use when looking for the same information. The more specific you can get, the better.
Too Much Focus on Links, Not Enough Focus on Your Website
Do not, under any circumstances, write content solely for the sake of trying to get backlinks and new followers. Of course, if content results in these things, that’s great. But your content should be interesting and compelling before everything else. Don’t focus on loading the content down with keywords just to include them…they need to fit naturally and not forced in like the wrong piece of a puzzle.
What are some other common SEO mistakes you have seen on a regular basis? And what strategies do you have to make sure your SEO is done naturally and without being blatant and forced?
