subject: 5 Tips To Avoid Common Mistakes In Seo When You Go It Alone [print this page] It could be that you know the importance of search engine optimisation and feel you have the skills necessary to optimise your site and get to the top of results pages by yourself. Avoiding employing SEO consultants would save money, and there can be no doubt that cutting back on spending is desirable from any business standpoint.
Most businesses see search engine optimisation as an endeavour too critical to their business to be left to chance. Employing a good team of specialists and involving yourself in what they do, learning for future maintenance, and following good advice generally gives publishers peace of mind thats worth the cost of employing experts. This is especially true if a companys site has been doing badly in terms of results. Bad ranking can really cause sleepless nights, if theres a good site going unseen and products on your shelves waiting to be sold.
One good reason for employing a reputable SEO agency is that there are many things that can go wrong when you go it alone. Good search engine optimisation is about finding a balance between the needs of a site and the needs of SEO. If you go it alone you could find that youve destroyed what was good and kept what wasnt working.
Weve compiled a list of five tips on how to avoid common mistakes when publishers go it alone with SEO.
1. Dont get carried away with link building. Good link building is about getting good quality links to and within your site. Armed with a little bit of knowledge, some publishers make the mistake of assuming that the importance of links lies in their quantity. If you are going it alone and see an advertisement for 1,000 instant links, you might well think why not?. Youd be making a big mistake, because search engines are now very sophisticated when it comes to judging the relevance on links to your site. A lot of irrelevant links appearing suddenly informs the search engines that youve probably bought them, ergo your site is not genuinely of interest. Search engines are free to penalise practises aimed at improving rank undeservedly. If you get carried away by reckless linking, you could find your SEO efforts working against you.
2. Dont abuse keywords. In just the same way as you can get carried away by getting many links, keywords are useful free SEO tools that its often tempting to overuse. Just the same as with links, over-inclusion of keywords is perceived as bad practice and punished.
3. Dont feature keyword tags that look unprofessional. Weve all seen sites on which the keyword tags leap out as us and tell us that the page looks cheap. Spend some time and effort making appropriate tags that will be useful to users if you want to get ahead where search engines are concerned.
4. Dont get it wrong with your anchor text. While anchor text ought to include keywords for maximum benefit, its not true that it needs to feature the entire description of a page. Too many publishers get this wrong and the results can be tiresome. Ineffective anchor text amounts to a wasted opportunity.
5. Dont believe everything you read. Much is written about SEO and not all of it is true. Reading the latest SEO news might be an interesting pursuit, but failing to separate the wheat from the chaff can be disastrous. One of the benefits of employing an established team of SEO consultants is that theyll have experience of what works and what doesnt which will translate well to the latest fads in the marketplace.
There are countless other ways in which things can go wrong when you go it alone with SEO, but we hope that the ones listed here will give you some idea of the ways in which mistakes are most commonly made. Going it alone might be a very noble endeavour. The information about good SEO is in the public domain. Sadly, it mingles with much misinformation and hearsay. Judging what to believe might take up a lot of time in and of itself.
As a businessperson, it is assumed that there are a great many demands on your time. Going it alone could get you into something that will take up time you cant afford. SEO from experts involves a lot of input from you. Beware of taking on more than you can chew!
