If your business has a website, SEO should be an essential element in your regular website maintenance. Keywords that improve your SEO ranking should be a cornerstone of your website copy, especially since 93 percent of online experiences now begin with a search engine.
Here are a few common SEO keyword mistakes that you may be making, but can easily correct today:
Spelling Errors in Keywords
In the early days of search engines, including keywords and every possible misspelling of the keyword were both considered SEO best practices to make sure the user got to your website. However, Google and Bing are now smart enough to recognize that a user has misspelled a word, so the search engine will convert it to the correct word and show users results for those correct words.
If you have left all of the meta data and misspelled keywords on your website in hopes to help with SEO, this is now hurting your website ranking. Since Google and Bing look for high-quality websites to rank higher in results for users, misspellings typically signal a lower quality site, leading to lower ranking, and fewer users being served your business’ website as a result. This is a quick fix by simply removing any misspellings from your website keywords and metadata.
Picking the Wrong Keywords
With nearly 2 billion websites in existence on the internet today, utilizing a common SEO strategy with heavily-used keywords will not earn you a good ranking in search results. One of the easiest errors to make is choosing the most obvious keywords for your business. Since these are obvious (think: Law Firm), there will be too much competition for your page to consistently rank well in search results.
A better approach is to choose 10 keywords more specific to your niche that have a lower level of search competition, and really master ranking for these keywords before expanding to broader keywords or a higher volume of keywords. If you’re a law firm that specializes in criminal defense law in Las Vegas for instance, a good keyword might be “Las Vegas Criminal Defense Law Firm.”
Keyword Stuffing
Not only will this hurt your ranking on search engines, if users do by chance make it to these pages on your site, keyword stuffing affects user experience in a negative way. Websites that use keyword stuffing in landing page copy typically stand out and read like they were written for search engines and not people. Keywords are great but they should be exactly that – key words that need to be included to improve the overall readability of your pages.
If you are finding that certain pages on your website have less copy and seem too empty, don’t resort to keyword stuffing to fill up the page – consult with a professional copywriter or web expert that could advise on how to fill the website pages with content beneficial to your audiences, while keeping only relevant keywords included for SEO rankings.
Keywords are the words that make it possible for your website to get visitors from search engines, so spending a little time to clean up your existing keywords and to create a plan for how to maximize effectiveness for future keyword efforts will lend itself to a successful SEO strategy.
75 percent of people never scroll beyond the first page of search engine results.
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