There are many qualities that every SEO specialist must possess in order to be successful in this field and avoid SEO mistakes, but one of the most important of these qualities is continuous learning and following up on updates . Gaining more experience in SEO is not just from reading articles. In fact, the best way to gain more experience is to experiment and fail many times until you learn the right strategy that brings good results.

However, when it comes to SEO, you can make a mistake without anyone noticing. You may not even know that you are doing something wrong. There are dozens of mistakes you can make, such as forgetting to add your target keyword in the page title or building low-quality backlinks.

Internet marketing is like playing the drums. Everyone thinks they can do the same thing. But if they think about it, they will discover that it is not that easy.

It’s okay for an average person to write content stuffed with the targeted keyword, and link the pages of the site together using the same keywords. But when an SEO specialist does the same thing, that’s a problem.

Unfortunately, we sometimes think that SEO specialists are infallible, even the best in this field can make some mistakes without noticing. Even me, yes, even me, sometimes I forget something that I should have done, but I quickly notice it by reviewing the plan I set for the project.

As Google’s algorithms continue to develop and integrate new search technologies, and as our strategies between optimizing our content for voice search, improving site speed and responsiveness across different types of devices, it can seem like an impossible task.

But here are some of the most common modern SEO mistakes that many SEO professionals make these days and even experts still make them.

Create a weak internal link structure

Due to the high volume of some sites especially news sites with all their content, you are bound to encounter some internal linking errors ranging from producing duplicate content in large quantities to having links that become 404 errors .

Link Structure is largely overlooked by webmasters, yet it is one of the most valuable factors in UX and SEO strategy.

Internal links provide four important factors for your site:

• Provide clear paths to conversion page links.
• Passing authority to weak website pages.
• Clearly organize your site pages with keyword-optimized text.
• Delivering search engine crawlers to your site’s most important pages.

Submitting an XML sitemap to search engines is the best way for search engine robots to discover the link paths of pages on your site that have not received internal links from other pages.

In the same vein, it’s important to use your robots.txt file and noindex code wisely so that you don’t accidentally prevent important web pages from being archived on your site or your client’s site.

Re-evaluate your site structure with fresh keyword research to start organizing your site pages by site sections.

Processing non-existent pages and backlinks to them

Broken (non-existent) page links are a major problem for websites, especially if they have backlinks pointing to them. Ignoring broken pages can cause a major problem.

John Doherty, founder and CEO of Credo, a portal that connects digital marketing experts with businesses, says this is one of the biggest mistakes people make, as well as one of his team’s top priorities when optimizing websites.

So, to understand why we should care about this, we first need to understand what broken links are. Broken links are simply links to a page that used to exist and is no longer there. So, it’s not the missing page that matters, but the links pointing to it from other sites or even internal links .

When Google crawls a website, it always starts from the root domain. For example, it crawls https://www.yoursite.com and then looks for internal links.

When Google crawlers find links to 404 pages, it is considered a waste of time and resources and Google does not like this.

In theory, there are infinite 404 error links, you can type anything after the site link and it will lead you to a 404 page, so a 404 page is actually not a problem until there is another page that links to it.

If you have a lot of broken internal links on your site, Google will be annoyed because you are constantly wasting its resources. So you should always check the links on your site. If your site is large, you can use some plugins on the WordPress platform that check the links every few days. One of the best plugins is the Broken Link Checker plugin . If your site does not use WordPress, you can use the Find Broken Links website .

Posting too many poor quality pages

This is another problem that is generally associated with large sites and that is the problem of “bad content”.

If you have a small website, it is very easy to provide a few good pages. But when you have a website with thousands of articles, the effort required to come up with useful content is much greater.

Thin content pages are pages that add no value to what is already on the web. Google has no reason to index the site, so you will end up with deleted results or getting this message in Search Console :

The above message is a manual action, which means you will have to submit a review request and someone hired by Google will look at your site to determine whether or not you have fixed the issue. This can take a long time, so be careful! However, it is possible for the algorithm to “penalize” your site without any warning, simply by lowering its ranking.

The important thing is that poor content doesn’t always mean a site needs text. Why do I say this? Matt Cutts talked about doorway pages earlier as an example, but what if you have a site that offers the same service in 100 cities? Should you write “unique” content for each page?

The truth is, there is no substitute for landing pages. They either have thin content or contain somewhat unique content. However, there are many more factors to consider when it comes to ranking than content. So if you have a car rental service, you don’t need to add filler content to every page, but you do need to do other things differently. Build the site well, make sure the design is user-friendly and consider starting a blog to add relevant content to your site.

Although adding original content to every page takes a lot of time, the idea is worth it if you really want to get results that you are happy with. Google has absolutely no reason to include you in its search results if the information you provide already exists, and in the same way.

Exclusive content is a very big problem these days, especially for large e-commerce sites that target multiple regions.

Recurring content

Duplicate content means very similar content on multiple pages within your site.

In general, duplicate content is content that does not add value to site visitors. Therefore, pages with little or no unique content are also considered duplicate content.

Duplicate content should be avoided, as it is not preferred by Google and may harm the performance and results of the site. If there are dozens of pages with duplicate content on a site, it must be taken care of and fixed, but duplicate content will reduce the appearance of the site’s pages in search results when there is a large amount of duplicate content (a ratio of more than 3 pages of duplicate content for every page with exclusive content)

Is there a penalty for duplicate content?

Yes, having duplicate content on your site can hurt your SEO , but it won’t get you a penalty from Google as long as you’re not copying content from another site.

But if Google finds a large percentage of content copied from other sites, you are subject to a penalty. Here is what Google tells us about it:

Duplicate content on a site is not a reason to take action on that site unless the duplicate content appears to be intended to deceive and manipulate search engine results. If your site has duplicate content issues, and you haven’t followed the advice above, we make a choice to release content to show in our search results.

Common reasons for duplicate content

Duplicate content is often caused by incorrect site or hosting settings. This issue is a technical issue and will never result in a Google penalty for your site. It can significantly impact your rankings, so it’s important to make the issue a priority to fix.

But besides the technical reasons, there are also reasons caused by us: content that is intentionally copied and published from another site, can lead Google to impose a penalty on the site if it is without mentioning the source of the original content.

Targeted keywords

Investing time in crafting a long piece of content will not bring many visitors to your site.

Just as bad, your site visitors will spend little time on the site and will not take any action you want them to.

So you are targeting the wrong keywords.

While most of us are aware of the importance of long tail keywords, we sometimes encounter some common mistakes:

• Failure to segment search volume and competition by geography.
• Relying heavily on highly competitive keywords.
• Focus on several factors on the main keywords through (external links, internal links, text links, etc.).
• Ignore CTR.
• Try to include exact match phrases in the content.
• Ignore AdWords metrics value.
• Assigning targeted keywords to unrelated content.
• Choosing keywords that are not relevant to your real audience.

It is important to analyze competitors and know what keywords they are targeting and what global and local searches are bringing them their target customers.

Use keyword analysis tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush to get ideas for relevant keywords.

Matt Cutts’ statement on the 5 most common SEO mistakes that many of us make

This video is by Matt Cutts , Head of Search Results Quality at Google. This video was published by the Google webmaster tools channel on YouTube. Matt Cutts talked about the 5 most common mistakes in the field of SEO . He expected his speech to be advanced as usual, but this time it was about simple advice, given that they are common mistakes among website owners, which are:

The site must be crawlable by Google robots.

Katz says that this problem is one of the major errors and recommends that it is necessary for the owner of each site to check the links of his site pages to make sure that they actually work. You can do this with the help of the tools mentioned above or by using the Chuck my links tool  for Google Chrome, which checks all the links on your site and any link that has an error, for example, it leads to a 404 or 301 page or does not work, this tool indicates it.

You do not add the correct keywords to your website pages.

Matt Cutts stressed that it is essential to test your keywords when you put them on your website pages. He said, for example, that you do not write “the height of Mount Everest,” but write “how high is Mount Everest?” because this is how visitors search for information. He also said that if you have a restaurant website, for example, make sure that the menu is on your website in a way that makes search engines read it easily. Some restaurants display the menu as a PDF file and do not put the text inside the website, and this prevents Google spiders from archiving what is inside the file.

Don’t just think about backlinks.

Because this will stop your creativity and make it limited. Instead of focusing all your energy on building backlinks only, it is better to think about writing content that attracts visitors to your site and think about a way to market your site.

Improve the appearance of the title and description of the site pages in search results

You must make sure that the titles of your important pages are distinctive, attract the attention of visitors, and express the content of your site. Also, the page description (Meta Description) is of great importance because it will appear to the visitor in the search results in Google, and therefore its importance is great in attracting the visitor to your site and making him prefer you over the other 9 results on the search results page.

Use webmaster tools

It is very important to use Google Webmaster service because it gives you important information and free tools that help you prepare your site in a way that suits the Google search engine.

Finally the video:

Conclusion

If you are an SEO or digital marketing professional and you are making any of these mistakes, take action immediately to fix them, because they are seriously affecting your websites! We hope this list of common SEO mistakes to avoid in 2019 and beyond is helpful to you and your team.

What SEO mistakes have you made so far? Share with us in the comments section so we can all