5 Big Mistakes in On-Site SEO (and how to avoid most of them)
Does trying to get your site ranked on Google make you feel like this:
Over the years, we have talked to a great deal of companies and fellow website builders who complain about their poor SEO results. More often than not, this is due to a poor SEO strategy. If you don't PLAN to have good SEO, it won't just magically happen. Getting to the Holy Grail (1st page of Google) starts at the site level. All the back-links in the world won't help if you don't have a good onsite foundation.
Here are the 5 biggest mistakes we see that lead to unsatisfactory SEO results:
Thin content: Google's customer is the person searching and they want that person to have the best experience possible when it comes to search results. To get this, crawl the web looking for relevant content. If your content isn’t better than the current top 10 results, there is hardly any chance that you’ll make it to the first-page search results.
Really, Really BAD on-page optimization: Sometimes we encounter websites with bad optimization issues...ok more than bad...more like nightmarish SEO. Think of it as looking under the hood of your car and not seeing an engine! That's what things like missing title tags, no alt text, strange URL names, etc will do to your website.
Image-based content: Search engines don't yet understand images. If you plan on adding text to am image with hopes of Google, Bing or Yahoo understanding and crawling that text, think again. Avoid adding text on your images, Google won’t be able to comprehend, and index, that content. This is more common than you’d think.
Bad or No Keyword Research: Keywords are like your "FOR SALE" sign. They tell search engines what you do and how to let people find your site. What do you want your content to rank for? Ideally you should find keywords with low competition and decent volumes of traffic to optimize your pages for.
Competition environment: This really is not an on-site issue as much as a business issue. There are some niches where it is going to be really difficult (ok, next to impossible) to rank highly on search engines. Let's say you are a personal injury attorney and your keyword is "Car Accident". That is extremely competitive and it’s not realistic to think you’ll make it without a blank check to spend on SEO.
