localSEO

In this day and age, seemingly everybody has access to the internet at all times. An increase in availability results in an increased importance of search engines. When somebody has a question they want answered, they turn to the internet. I’m sure you’ve all uttered or heard the phrase “Google it.” With Google becoming the king of the internet, it has become more critical to businesses success to rank on Google. Regardless of what type of business you own, or what niche you’re in, ranking well on Google WILL increase your business traffic, resulting in growth. The only problem is that it can be quite difficult to rank well in Google, and understanding how to properly do SEO can be very time consuming and confusing. To make matters worse, a lot of information on SEO is actually bad information, that will not only not help rank your website, but may also penalize your site in the search engines. In this article I’m going to discuss some basic SEO mistakes, and what you can do to avoid penalizing your website.

1. Buying Links

There are many services out there which offer to send links to your website. While this may seem to be a good idea at first, it is important that you realize this can be very dangerous. While it is necessary to have links pointing to your site in order to rank, it can do more harm than good to spam your website with links. Focus on building high quality links rather than simply paying somebody to send links to your site. When you buy links you can not guarantee the quality of those links, and if the links pointing to your site are low quality, Google's crawlers will actually penalize your site. It may be easier to simply by links, but there are no short cuts to SEO. Any shortcuts you do take may give you some positive results initially, but Google will eventually punish you.

2. Poor Website Structure

The second issue that I’m going to discuss is poor website structure. In general, the home page on your website will have the most link juice, giving it the most authority. The authority of your websites home page should be passed along to other pages on your website. It is crucial that the site has more of a flattened structure, than a multi-tiered structure. This is because the farther a page is from your homepage, the weaker the link juice your homepage passes on will be. No page on your site should be more than two or three clicks away from the homepage, ideally it all pages would be linked to from the home page, but that is not necessary, and in some cases could be harmful.

3. Unvaried Anchor Text

This mistake is pretty easy to avoid, yet many beginners still seem to fall into the mistake of using the same anchor text. If you are trying to rank your website for a construction company, do not use any one of your keywords more than 20% of the time as anchor text. Not varying your anchor text will result in Google penalizing your website.

There are many other common SEO mistakes that beginners and seasoned pros alike make, but just understanding and avoiding these simple mistakes can go along way towards helping you rank your website. Be sure to check back in the future for more updates and SEO mistakes to avoid.