Improving your SEO strategy is one of the most effective ways to increase your web page’s traffic.

However, building an effective SEO strategy involves much more than simply filling your web page with as many keywords as possible. In fact, many people unintentionally damage their website’s SEO by making a variety of common mistakes.

To help you avoid doing the same, we’ve outlined the top seven most common SEO mistakes to avoid:

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the practice of repeating keywords throughout your site in the hope that the site will rank highly in search engine queries for those particular keywords. (e.g., Filling a block of text with the same repeated keyword.) Keyword stuffing goes far beyond using keywords as a naturally occurring element of your site’s content, and it can result in your site being banned.  Best practice post Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird Google updates is to use your keywords naturally in your text, and err on the side of caution with repeating keywords unnaturally.

Duplicate Content

Your site needs to have original content. Not only does this mean that you shouldn’t plagiarize or otherwise copy content from other sites, but that you need to be careful about repeating content within your own site. In other words, don’t repeat the same content across multiple pages of your site.

Using the wrong keywords

You’ve followed all the right SEO protocols for optimizing your website’s keywords, but how do you know that your target audience will be able to find you by using the keywords you’ve chosen? Many site owners have a set of keywords in mind when they design their sites, but SEO strategies won’t be effective if your keywords don’t match vocabulary that your target audience is using.  Keyword research continues to be one of the most important aspects of a content/inbound marketing strategy for this very reason.

Not tagging images

Most of the images that you upload to your site will originally be tagged with generic – or meaningless – names. Renaming your images meta description and giving them captions that are in line with your site’s keywords will help improve your site’s SEO.  Again, best describe them as what they are versus keyword stuffing per the above point.

Links gone wrong

There are a number of ways that links can hinder your site’s SEO. First, you’ll want to check that your links all function correctly. You’ll also want to spend some time reviewing your site’s internal linking structure. Your site’s pages should link to each other so that your site can be easily navigated. However, it’s also important to be judicious about your internal links. Stuffing your site’s pages with internal links is counterproductive.

Difficult for crawlers to index

Creating a sitemap is a good first step toward making your site easy for search engine crawlers to index. If you’re using Wordpress, you can use the Google XML Sitemap plugin for this purpose. You’ll also want to address any site errors, as these can hinder search engine crawlers from pursuing your site. In addition, try to ensure that your site loads quickly and that a large portion of your content is text.

Not utilizing content

If you want your site to be indexed, then you’ll need to fill it with as much high quality, relevant content as possible. Whether you're blogging or adding more descriptive content to your site's pages, adding content is an excellent SEO strategy. Content per the much overused phrase continues to be 'king' and moreso in the modern internet where there are increasingly more and more content producers out there vying for their share of consumers and buyers eyes.  

If you want to improve your website’s SEO, it’s worthwhile to spend time researching essential SEO tactics beyond the ones listed above. Whether you’re starting a website or want to improve one you already have, following basic SEO best practices is an essential way to attract your target audience to your site.