Sin #1: Not optimizing consistently

After setting up an SEO campaign, your work is not finished by a long shot. Google and other search engines are consistently changing their algorithms and what they consider relevant websites. In order to stay up on the latest search engine trends, consistent managment and maintenance must be done on a website to prevent loss of ranking. Your competitors are most likely consistently utilizing SEO techniques to keep their website search engine fresh. In order to stay atop the rankings, you will need to stay competitive.

Sin #2: Casting an unnecessarily wide geographical net

As a small business, sometimes you may feel compelled to target more than you may necessarily need through search engine optimization. For example, geographically, targeting an entire state or country when it is unnecessary. Sometimes, as a small business, you can just target a few towns or a few counties in New Jersey for example and achieve growth results. More on this topic can be seen here.

Sin #3: Trying to optimize a small and/or outdated website

Search engines want the most relevant content and the most relevant websites to show up first. With a small and/or outdated website, it makes it that much more difficult to optimize these websites for high rank. The more pages with relevant content you feed into the search engines, the more important your website will be because website users want the most relevant site for the keyword they are searching.

Sin #4: Not targeting qualified keywords

This particular sin drives us crazy. Targeting keywords that may sound good initially, but may be not be as relevant to your website as you think. The result? Lots of money spent, no return and a very frustrated business owner who thinks SEO does not work. By researching keywords and targeting them directly to your business, you put yourself at the forefront of your customer\’s eyes when they are searching for their particular keyword. The result? More potential customers.

Sin #5: Targeting highly competitive, low traffic keywords

Believe it or not, there are keywords out there that are brutally competitive to optimize for, but yet, have been found to yield very little traffic. This combination does not come up often, but certainly does exist. This occurs when many different website owners fail to do their homework on a particular keyword and make assumptions based on a particular keyword. The keyword sounds good so it must be generating website traffic. If you do your due diligence, you will find that there are keywords out there that have low competition and potentially high traffic in the search engine market.

Sin #6: Using unethical black hat techniques for short term gain

Hiding keywords within the text, creating squeeze pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc. Don\’t do it. The search engines will eventually find you and they will ban you. Once your website is blacklisted, it is very difficult to reacquire the trust and importance for your website.

Sin #7: Not optimizing at all

If you are not even in the game, then you cannot possibly win. As more and more customers shift their focus to online search, the more and more important SEO continues to be. Everytime somebody searches a keyword that is relevant to your business and your website fails to show up on the first page, you just lost that customer. And make no mistake, your competitor just scooped them up.

Author Bio: John Ferrughelli is the founder and president of Potenture, a professional website design and SEO company. His company specializes in SEO, Pay per click marketing, website design and social media marketing.

Category: Internet
Keywords: seo, search engine optimization