Before you launch your first small business SEO campaign it is important to avoid the mistakes that others have made. What are the most common mistakes new companies make when trying to learn online marketing? Consider these 5 common blunders…
1. Keyword Stuffing
This is an old school SEO tactic and one that doesn’t have much use today. While all campaigns will require keyword density strategy, the “stuffing” of keywords is just as likely to merit a search engine penalty for a webpage as it is to be ignored.
2. No In-Coming Links and/or In-Effective Internal Linking
A backlink is a link to your webpage from another website and is considered a ‘vote’ for your web page. A website without any links is virtually an island onto itself. If it doesn’t link out, or at least internally, then it will not be discovered by search bots. Internal Linking is another big factor. If you don’t give importance to an internal page yourself, why would a search engine?
3. Poorly Written Content
Why do companies still do this? Do they really want to publish badly written pages on their industry and try to pass this inferior writing off as expert opinion? Not only are people smart enough to see through this, but search bots are growing wise too. Every new iteration of search engine algorithm update is getting better at identifying good content.
4. Poor Choice of Keywords
An SEO campaign lives or dies on the appropriate selection of keywords. If you do not research the right keywords or base your entire campaign around “instincts” you are bound to be disappointed. Without careful targeting of keywords, you may not receive any traffic at all!
5. Unrealistic Expectations
Many companies still believe that in order for SEO to prove itself profitable, it must perform monumental tasks in a very short period of time. Yes, super-SEO…a few blogs and articles capable of attracting the entire Internet and causing a wildfire of publicity! It’s not going to happen and not just in SEO, but in any medium. Web marketing is a continual process, just like any form of advertising. I’ll say it again: SEO is a long-term process.
You can succeed in web marketing, as long as you take the job seriously, treat the public with respect and give it some time to grow.
