The fight for the best possible position in the search results has become one of the main ones when it comes to conquering the target market and marketing products or services. Optimizing content for search engines is one of the most important tasks when it comes to website design and content creation. It often happens that during optimization certain mistakes are unwittingly sneaked in, especially mistakes in on-page SEO.

In our new article, read about the mistakes in on-page SEO that can cause more harm than good to your site.

Cardinal errors in On-page SEO

Many sites implementing such tactics faced severe penalties from which it was impossible to recover. The bottom line is that Google has become much smarter and continues to improve its algorithm every day. For this reason, SEO is constantly evolving, and so must our on-page content optimization strategies.

Targeting keywords just to drive traffic

In the old days, website owners would include popular (and often inappropriate) keywords in their content, with the sole purpose of driving traffic to the site. However, after users arrived at the site page, they encountered content that did not match the term they used in their search. They certainly won’t convert for the simple fact that what was on the page didn’t match what they were looking for. What’s more, the unsatisfied will soon leave the site in further search for content that answers their search.

While high-volume keywords present an opportunity to drive traffic to your site, targeting keywords that are not relevant to your brand can cause serious harm. Not only will you misrepresent your content, but you’ll also confuse search engines and get penalized.

Stick to your niche. Understand that as Google indexes the pages on your website, it takes into account all the content and topics you engage with throughout the site (and beyond that page) and then ranks them according to the queries it deems relevant. The suggestion is to write about what you want to be recognized by, both users and search engines.

Unnatural internal linking

Internal linking can be an extremely powerful SEO strategy if done correctly. Ideally, it allows you to link web pages together and create an ideal structure or path for search engines and users.

Both users and search engines use links to find content on your site. Internal links should provide users with relevant information about the linked keyword and topic. Google uses links to understand the relationship between content and the meaning of the linked term, while readers use links to find valuable, related information.

Unfortunately, many people often try to link their site pages with keyword-rich anchor text in an unnatural way and in a way that doesn’t make sense and doesn’t look natural. Google may flag this as undesirable behavior and lead to a penalty.

So when building internal links try to answer some of the following questions for yourself:

• Does this link provide real value to users?
• Does this link make sense with the text I’m linking from?
• What other content might users want to explore after reading this page?
• Would users expect to go to a page with this type of information, or is the anchor text misleading?
• How often do I link to this page (on this page and other content)?

Overdoing keywords

Offering value to readers should be at the forefront of all SEO and content marketing tactics. Previously, sites using warlike tricks could position themselves well. Keyword stuffing was one of the most common content creation tactics because it simply brought results. Site owners would simply identify the keywords they wanted to rank for and, mostly indiscriminately, fill their content with those words and phrases.

However, Google has long since become much better at understanding content that provides value and answers questions that users ask and oong content that is created in an attempt to trick the algorithm. To make sure that you offer real value and do not abuse keyword stuffing, read more about this phenomenon in our article.

Not optimizing for mobile devices

Mobile optimization has not always been a major focus for SEO professionals in the past. However, today this segment is crucial for SEO. Google first announced that it was experimenting with mobile indexing in 2016.

Mobile-first has become one of the most important factors in the ranking. Google has begun to favor those sites that are optimized for use on mobile devices. Make sure the mobile version of your web pages correctly reflects the content you want Google to index and rank in search results.

Always remember that search engines and their algorithms don’t like it when someone tries to cheat them, and they punish such attempts very harshly. We hope that the tips from this text will be useful to you in designing a quality strategy and content optimization on the website, and that you will not make these mistakes in on-page SEO. For more useful educational texts visit our News & Stories page.