8 SEO Mistakes You’re Making in 2017

SEO is changing just about as fast as a Google search. There are so many factors that play into a search result placement. Here are eight things that may have worked in the past but are hurting your ranking today. Take care of these SEO mistakes and to ensure you make money online in the future.

1. Pretending Mobile Doesn’t Exist

As the trends turn mainstream, it’s clear that mobile users aren’t going anywhere. It’s likely that over half of your users are engaging (or trying to engage) with your site from a mobile device. If you aren’t yet designing for mobile-first, the higher bounce rate will hurt your SEO ranking.

2. Not Optimizing Great Content

As content marketing takes hold in the advertising world, it might be easy to think that just having great content is going to be enough to draw the crowds. Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Your long-form hub post still needs keywords, meta tags, pictures and everything else that make for good SEO. I use the Yoast Pro SEO plugin to help make recommendations to avoid these SEO mistakes.

Related: How To Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy In 2018

3. Plain Old Bad Content

It is certainly easy to get super cheap blog posts from a content mill, but if they don’t deliver value (and they probably won’t at five dollars a blog) to your reader, it’s not worth your time. Not to mention that the search engines are getting better at spotting bad content, which will just hurt your rankings. Ensure your content is original as no one wants to read the same post on 20 blog sites.

4. Non-Existent Meta Tags

Meta tags aren’t the chief deciding factor in SEO ranking, which means that they’re often overlooked. They don’t take too much time to write, and whatever you write will be more effective than whatever the search engine decides to write for you.

Related: 5 Top WordPress Plugins for SEO

5. Really Short Posts

Succinct or not, search engines believe that there must be a significant chunk of content for a blog to be useful to a reader. If that means only posting one longer blog a week instead of two shorter pieces, that’s the way to go.

6. Link Errors

You know how annoying it is to click on a broken link and get a 404 error. Well, Google knows that and tries to avoid serving websites with bad links in them. Make sure that all the main pages of your website are working and easy to get to.

7. Bad URL Structure

Frankly, this is one that both users and machines can agree on. A solid, simple, SEO-ready URL structure is just plain better for users and easier for the algorithms to understand. A good solid blog foundation and SEO plugins are important to avoid these SEO mistakes. Make sure you setup your permalinks structure properly in platforms like WordPress.  I use Yoast Pro SEO plugin to recommend url naming structure.

8. Sitemap Navigation

Sitemap sounds like such an old term that it may not feel relevant anymore. However, a clear sitemap is a great way to ensure that the search engines index all the content that you’ve worked so hard to optimize.

Related: How to Build a Solid Blog Foundation

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