Does SEO mean anything to you? And do you also know the 10 SEO mistakes to avoid if you want to rank well? If you’re not sure, read this article carefully to boost your visibility on the web and enter the big leagues, or rather, join those who are making it to the top of the podium on the first page of Google results! If you have a website, it’s impossible not to be familiar with this acronym, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation. And for those of you who are new to the web and want to reach more customers, you’ll have no choice but to consider these three magic letters as part of your marketing strategy. So you might as well get to know the 10 SEO mistakes to avoid if you want to position yourself rapidly on top of the first results page!
For your next blog post, you’ve decided to position yourself on an ultra-competitive keyword, thinking you can have the lion’s share by bringing new qualified leads to your website? But be careful! Not everyone has the authority of the behemoths that share the first page of Google results… If your site is in its first stages of development, or if you are a small business that doesn’t publish several dozen articles a month on your blog, don’t waste your time trying to position yourself on keywords with a high volume of searches, or you’ll end up losing your marbles!
To try and compete with the most visible companies on the web, go for keywords without a high search value. It could be very beneficial for you… and here’s why:
As you will have realised, it’s better to position yourself on an ultra-precise long-tail keyword than on an ultra-competitive keyword at the (almost certain) risk of being swallowed up and going completely unnoticed on the web.
According to SEO experts and digital marketing pros, this technique from another era won’t get you positioned on the first page of Google results… Very popular just a few years ago, this technique completely sidelined the user experience. The result of this SEO ‘technique’? Repeated priority and secondary keywords, tirelessly, making the content indigestible and, in any way, unreadable.
Today, the idea is to find the right balance. You need to continue to impress Google, while offering your audience a text with high added value. Be creative and offer your readers a rich semantic cocoon, made up of synonyms and variants of your keywords, while maintaining a reasonable (but sufficient) occurrence of your keywords (1 keyword every 100 words is more than enough to make Google understand what your article is about).
We all agree on this: SEO copywriting is time-consuming. You have to come up with topics for blog posts, create an outline, do research, define your keywords and semantic cocoon, write, proofread, fill in tags, find photos or infographics… The list is long, and rather daunting for those whose job it isn’t! Yes, there’s no miracle when it comes to maintaining a quality blog: either you’re an experienced SEO copywriter or you hire experienced SEO copywriters.
Some beginners (or tricksters) might be tempted to copy content that is already online… And duplicate content has no place on the web! Remember, Google is an intelligent machine. It scans all the content on the Internet and if it detects plagiarised content, it will not hesitate to make the person behind pay heavily for their wrongdoing. In other words, this will have a significant (and negative) impact on your SEO ranking:
As you can see, duplicate content is a no-no for your website’s SEO! What about artificial intelligence? Yes, that technological marvel that has made SEO copywriters shiver and business leaders fantasise about being able to say goodbye to them (and, above all, produce a lot more content for next to nothing) at the beginning of 2023… Well, artificial intelligence is still a great tool that can save you time by creating an outline for your blog post, developing the main ideas of each of your paragraphs, but if you publish the text created by the AI as such, you won’t stand a chance of being ranked well by the search engines – quite the opposite! Your content will be fairly flat, stripped of all emotion, which won’t inspire prospects to read your text all the way through! Remember… we don’t want a bounce rate! And above all, always bear in mind that the Google robot is intelligent and knows that your article is generated by AI… You definitely can’t hide anything from Google!
Most web users don’t read articles in their entirety, or skim through them to find the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible. If they come across a huge pamphlet, with no headings or sub-headings, written in a single block, they will stop reading your blog article just as quickly, and that’s not good for a website’s SEO!
It may sound intimidating, but it’s not, even if HTML terminology can frighten some people… However, to structure your article properly, you’re going to have to take a step back in time to your school days, when you learned how to write an essay. To refresh your memory, here are the main points to bear in mind when writing a blog post that makes you want to be read to the end:
It’s often at this point that budding bloggers start to lose focus and stray away from their objective: to attract more leads. Now we’re getting into the more technical side of SEO, but don’t worry, I’ll explain everything!
Now that the keywords have been optimized and your article is well laid out, you’re going to have to deal with the meta tags. These are vitally important, as they have a significant impact on the CTR (Click Through Rate). Yes, they increase the famous CTR that all bloggers are looking for, and the higher the click-through rate, the more Google defines your article as ‘relevant’. You’ve got it… It’s impossible to ignore these meta tags if you want to have a chance of being positioned on the first page of search engine results…
THE TITLE TAG:
THE META DESCRIPTION TAG:
Now that you’ve understood the importance of filling in your meta tags correctly, you’re going to have to do the same for the images in your blog post, because, yes, you have to make your blog post more attractive with images, or risk seeing your bounce rate rise considerably… It’s still a lot of work, and you’re going to have to keep racking your brains, but it’s for a worthy cause, or rather for the SEO of your company blog!
If you want to fill in the Title tag of your image correctly, you need to be informative, but also concise. There’s no room here for long sentences! Aim for 50 to 60 characters maximum, include your keywords naturally and be incisive!
To fill in the Alt tag of your image correctly, you need to show empathy and think about the visually impaired, whether they are internet users or Google! Google can’t see images… It needs to be told what they represent before it can suggest them to web users. If you don’t fill in this tag, it means that your image is of no use to your site’s SEO, other than to make your blog post visually appealing. To fill in the Alt tag for an image correctly, be precise: an Alt tag of between 80 and 100 characters is ideal. Finally, don’t forget the number 1 objective of this tag and describe the image precisely (bearing in mind that you are describing it for the visually impaired or blind).
Example: For an image of a cupcake, don’t write ‘cake’, but ‘pink cupcake with cream decorated with a cherry’
Finally, this tag allows you to enter your keyword. So don’t miss this opportunity to position yourself on the first page of search results and insert your keyword naturally in your Alt tag!
To enhance the user experience and generate more leads, don’t forget to fill in the description of the image in your blog post. To do this successfully, you need to provide a detailed explanation of the image (without forgetting to include keywords, but without overloading on them).
The cherry on the top is that search engines take into account the description of the image to understand the subject of your article, which is excellent for your SEO ranking. And why is that? Quite simply because the more you present relevant text related to the image, the more Google will want to rank you well!
First of all, it’s important to understand the difference between an internal link and an external link.
Internal links are essential to the success of your SEO strategy. There are three specific reasons for this:
There’s no better way to gain credibility on the web, but first of all, what are external links? You could say that they are a kind of “digital bridge”, allowing you to move from one site to another…
If a website links to one of your blog posts, this gives search engines the information that your website is legitimate and therefore worth seeing. Also known as backlinks, they significantly increase the authority of your page.
However, if they are of poor quality, they are of absolutely no use! That’s why the primary objective when it comes to the role of backlinks in boosting SEO is to prioritise quality over quantity. To put it simply, it’s vital that the external links pointing to your site have a recognised authority in their field.
For your part, check regularly that your external links point to reliable sources. If your links are broken or send your visitors to a site with little credibility, you’ll be damaging the user experience, and I’m telling you right now, the search engines won’t like that at all!
First of all, let me answer the question on your mind: ‘What is search intent?’ Search intent is the set of motivations and objectives behind the queries made by users. To be precise, there are four types of search intent, and if you don’t want to miss out on your SEO strategy, you might as well find out about them straight away!
Example: “What are the 10 SEO mistakes to avoid?
Content to offer: FAQ, blog article, glossary, pillar page of your website
Example: ‘Amazon’
Content to suggest: home page, company page on your website
Example: ‘digital communications agency customer review’
Content to offer: buying guides, customer reviews, product pages
Example 4: ‘netflix registration’
Content to offer: product and service pages
Now that you know everything about search intent and the content to offer for each of them, all you have to do is adapt to what users are looking for to generate even more leads and keep your website’s bounce rate as low as possible!
The UX or user experience is crucial if your website is to be well referenced by search engines. Why is this? Quite simply because before thinking about Google, you need to think about your visitors. And you don’t have to look far to find the answers… You’re an Internet user too, aren’t you? So just ask yourself what the negative points are that make you leave a website straight away!
I’ve listed the 3 main things you should avoid if you want to boost your SEO ranking:
Google likes new things, so you might as well give them something new! Depending on your editorial calendar, you can publish 2 blog posts a month, a week or even a day! It’s up to you, but if you’ve ever written and published blog posts, you’ll know that this is a time-consuming task… The idea, by regularly updating your blog posts, is to offer the search engines something new, without spending hours creating a new article.
To update your blog posts properly, start by deleting obsolete information, include the latest information on the subject, update your figures, include a new infographic and add a paragraph if you have relevant new information to reveal on the subject.
You may also decide to merge several articles together in order to transform 2 or 3 short articles (which is not ideal for the bounce rate) into one long, relevant, well-researched article. And don’t forget… The more in-depth your article explores a subject, the better it will be ranked by search engines. And finally, don’t neglect to add internal links to more recent articles on your blog to boost the SEO ranking of your website
Now that you know the 10 SEO mistakes to avoid if you want to be well-referenced by the search engines, get to your keyboards!
