4 SEO mistakes that can destroy your site's ranking

There’s one goal in online marketing, and that’s to get your web page to the top of Google’s rankings. But many of you may be making mistakes than hurt your chances of landing at the top. What follows are some of the most common mistakes people make when doing SEO optimization for their website.

1. Dismissing SEO as unimportant

A surprising number of people believe that producing good content is enough to get their site ranked. But even the greatest content will not make up for a lack of proper SEO best practices. You still need to build your site in such a way that search engines like Google can easily index it for users, and there’s a whole list of things to do, including:

• Using SEO-Friendly URLs.
• Avoiding ugly URLs such as: backlinko.com/p=123
• Starting titles with keywords.
• Adding modifiers to the title.
• Wrapping your blog post title in an H1 tag.
• Wrapping subheadings in H2 tags
• Making sure the keyword is used in the first 100 words
• Using responsive design on your site (so it’s optimized for mobile displays).

2. Not doing any link building

Ensure that the content on your site doesn’t fall stagnant. That means you need to build links to your content, using strategies such as content promotion (or guest blogging), creating content that people are likely to link too, and getting local citations.

3. Guest posting without proper vetting first

Writing articles for other blogs is a great way to gain exposure and boost your leads, but be careful only to write for reputable websites. You’ll need to investigate the site you want to write for first, because writing for unreliable, misleading or “spammy” sites could actually do more harm than good, damaging your reputation and hurting your own site’s ranking if you link to it. Check the site you are aiming to guest blog for and see if it’s audience matches your own target audience. Also, does it seem trustworthy considering its domain authority, link profile, online ratings and reviews?

4. Not promoting your own content

It’s one thing to write great content, but you’ll need to promote and distribute it in order to get yourself heard. Almost fifty percent of all website content has just two or less Facebook interactions, while 75 percent of all content posted on the web had no external links, according to the 2016 State of Link Building Survey. As such, you’ll need to make a plan to promote your content, for example via your email list, social media, paid distribution or a combination of all three.

5. Ignoring internal links

Internal links are important both from a ranking and user-experience perspective. Linking to your other pages and posts helps to evenly distribute link equality throughout your site, and also increases metrics like time-on-site and page views. Some best practices for using internal links effectively include: only linking to highly-relevant content; using natural anchor text rather than using keywords just to rank; linking to "deep" pages (i.e., not just your homepage) so you spread link equity throughout your site; including at least 2-3 internal links in each piece of content you create.