In the past, SEO was easy and literally anyone could have gotten great results after reading a few tutorials. Nowadays, everything is highly complex. We can easily end up making mistakes without realizing it. Even professionals end up in this situation.
What you need to do is take a step back and look at search engine optimization from an objective point of view. In the event that you think some strategy or technique is weird because it does not seem natural, there is a huge chance that you are correct.
In order to help you out a little, we will talk about some mistakes that a lot of professionals make. We are sure that this will help you in your blogging career.
Too Many Rich Keyword Anchor Links
Google understood a long time ago that when they see that the majority of web links towards a particular page is made out of the same exact phrase, something unnatural was happening. This is extremely true today. Think about how you link to other blog posts or sites.
Do you always use the same text like another blogger? Since you do not do that, why would that be good for you? Try to have variety since that will help out a lot and it is also a very good idea to try to include your site brand in the links after the latest Penguin update.
Too Many Links In A Short Period Of Time
More links mean more popularity, right? Wrong! Well, at least when thinking about how fast you receive those links. The truth is that when you keep getting a lot of links after you just launched your site or wrote an article, Google realizes that something is fishy.
Organic links are a lot more important and these are the ones you should be after. Steady and slow link building is what the SEO specialist needs to focus on.
Excess Homepage Links
You believe that you can build authority on your home page and that part of it will rub off on other site pages. This is not actually like that. Once again, think about it. When you link to a site naturally, do you link the home page or the page with the information that is relevant to what you write?
Really Bad Content
The best thing that you can do is write pages that have around 2000 words. That is difficult, we know, but just test it out.
When most of your site is filled with 200 words pages, the quality offered is definitely lower than when comparing with another site that has around the same pages but each one is around 1000 words. Which articles are more likely to be shared? Those shares bring in natural, organic links.
Failing To Understand The Importance Of Loading Time
There is a reason why hosting companies offer dedicated servers. It is because they are better than shared hosting. When your site loads at a very low rate and your hosting provider is to blame, you need to change that provider. A page that loads slowly will make the visitor leave. It will not bring in many natural links and this hurts your overall SEO strategy.
Just One Backlink Type
You found a service that allows you to get backlinks from niched blogs with high authority. That is great. BUT! Quality content generates different types of backlinks and has authority established in different ways. You should always think about social share, site age, author rank and where the links come from.
The bottom line is that most SEO professionals end up sticking to just one path. This is the worst mistake. If you want your blog to be a success, you need to branch out and mix things up.
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Hey Jane,
Nice write up and thanks for sharing this. I still remember those days I did the same mistake over and over again, too many same links on each page. Haha!
Nonetheless, thanks for sharing this write up
Ya I too have made that mistake Reginald! Thanks for being so honest lol.
Excellent Points Jane !
As Pengiun and Panda modules of google search algorithm are continuously monitoring and taking down over-optimized websites its always important to stick to the basics of good search engine optimization strategies .These points are the perfect suggestions of good SEO practices .
-Pramod
Sadly I’m still seeing quite some over-optimized sites. Don’t know how they managed to fly under the Google radar!
Soham Roy says
Definitely an informative article. I find most folks eventually trying to sell SEO services under the camouflage of ‘I am gonna educate you on SEO’ articles. This article ,for a change is an honest attempt to actually enlighten us readers on Optimization.
Oh ya! The basics never change; especially when it comes to creating value. But when someone teaches a new technique we must be really cautious in implementing!
Nice write up and thanks for sharing this. I still remember those days I did the same mistake over and over again, too many same links i did before now i know what i did ! thanks a lot for ur post
Thanks for sharing the mistake you made Samir
Blog commenting also bring one type of links to our own blog, so how do you see this type of links to enhance the visibility of our blog. Waiting for your kind reply in this case Jane.
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Blog commenting and guest posting are great ways to build backlinks. Again it all boils down to one point - provide/create value. Commenting or guest posting for the sake of links is going to push you down the hole. But creating value both on your own blog and on other blogs (in the form of comments and guest posts) will always give you an edge.
Read the post, very nice write up. The final conclusion is, we should not build links rather generate killer content that can be linked on may many blogs as resource. right? Which means the era of link earning has been started. Isn’t it?
Well said John - the era of link earning that is - true.
you are right jane, but one thing i want to know, is there any limitation of building links i mean any particular number of links to be built in a time interval. i have a blog and its 3 months old so how fast should i build links for it?
Thanks Jane, I was about to write a blog for my site I will hold in brain the above mentioned mistakes. This will be my superb guide will writing the content. You have habitually been life saviour to all.
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I can’t get if. What’s the effect of having bad content to your SEO? And “bad content” isn’t the right term, it should be “low-quality content”
Hi Jane,
You’re absolutely right - SEO perhaps was easier earlier, but with the recent Google updates, one no longer really knows what’s working and not working any longer. More so, things keep changing so fast that it becomes tough to keep pace with things. I surely have a tough time there!
I’m glad I am no SEO expert, and whatever little I know, I wonder if it really does work at all - because I don’t use any software or tool. I liked the mistakes you mentioned that we need to keep in mind. Steady and slow link building sounds good! At least now you won’t have people running for links all over
I think variation is what works best, where keywords are concerned. Strangely enough, I’ve even seen some of my articles rank better when I use no keywords at all - I don’t know how that works, but it has on a number of posts when I last checked on them.
It’d be good if Google gradually does away with keywords and concentrates more on quality content that is of help to people. One thing good is that now longer articles are preferred over the normal 500-700 word ones, gives me a sigh of relief!
Thanks for sharing all of these mistakes with us. Have a nice day ahead
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Nice write Jane.
One of my EMD got hit with excess link on homepage, but the excess was just 20 links… hahahah.
So what this excess means is still a confusion and the best part is there is no calculations available on it.
what i think is we need some explanation on it, so dont forget to share if you thoughts on it.
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Nice tips Jane and it is amazing to see some old tecniques still being done today. Jane, when you say too links on a page, how many is just too many? I see many bloggers and myself doing end of year posts with links to top blogs, etc with 10-40 links on a post. Curious how that works or if it’s a ratio by word count. Thank you!
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Hi Jane,
Thanks for the update on SEO mistakes. SEO is confusing to me and with all of the changes in Google it’s even more so.
What is good this week might not work next week or next month. I’m curious, how many links is too many links? Does anyone know?
Maybe Matt Cuts could tell us. I would be interested to know
Geri
I have found your tip to build links slowly for a new site, very important. At least for the first 6 or 8 weeks of the site. After that, links can be built a little faster.
I never thought about not building links just for my homepage. It makes a lot of sense. I will try to build some links for the different posts and pages within the main domain too, thank you.
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Fantastic post Jane! For me one of the best ways i have found on how to improve your website is by watching Matt Cutts presentations.
As far as link building, it is only a small part of the Google algorithm. I had a bunch of poor links pointing to my site, which hurt my pagerank. It is much easier to get bad links, then to get rid of them.
We all hear content is king. Google places much emphasis on it. I try to add new content daily and also change content so Google can see the changes when it crawls the page.
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If you link to one of your blog post with keyword rich anchor text on your own blog, would you add ‘no follow’ link in that case?
What a much needed and informative blog. I learned the hard way with excessive links to the homepage. I also agree with too many links in a short period of time. I need to look, well actually be look at the PR’s of my backlinks after the change. I also checked the load time of my website. So, thank you for that info. Thanks again for the post
Hi, I have started one blog in early 2013, I have also kept one SEO agency to devlope backlink and they have gauranteed top 5 ranking on Google. They have made 100 backlinks in 1 month and after 1 month my site ranking comes down and it was on 8th page. Google have penalize my site without any reason showing in google webmaster tools. I now noticed that the same may happens due to too many backlinks in a short duration. Nice content to understand the SEO. It will surely helps to other new comers.
This is really necessary - to understand SEO as much as we are able. And things are so often changing that we have to be on our game to stay on top of things. At least that has been my experience. Understanding loading time and making our sites mobile-friendly are pretty important too. I’m going to keep plugging away. Blessings, Amy
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Yup I’m certainly guilty of using over optimised anchor text.
I have changed this in light of Google recent updates and am now leaning towards long tail anchor text or branded anchor text.
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