How to avoid SEO mistakes
When the Internet was young in the late 90s, I remember web pages would put hundreds of keywords on the webpage on the bottom and they would make the font very small and the same colour as the background. This would rank the webpage high on the search engine. If you were to do the same thing today, Google would definitely mark your website as SPAM and put it in the ignore list.
There is no formula, only guidelines
If there is a formula then no-one knows of it. There are a lot of guidelines to do this and do that but there is not one universal formula that will apply to everyone. Yoast may analyse your page and say there are not enough keywords or may say there are too many keywords. This is only a guide and you should definitely not start adding or removing Keywords just because Yoast recommends.
Other SEO websites may say every page needs to have a mission statement to perform well on Google’s Search Results. Their formula is “Our (company) is where (audience) finds (content) for (benefit)”.
Eg; Microbite, where (customers) find (website information) to (help them make informed decisions).
Maybe i misinterpreted the formula? It may apply for some website but it definitely will not apply to most.
Avoid “Guaranteed SEO Results”
When you want to outsource SEO to another company, avoid the ones that guarantee your website on the first page of Google, because no-one can do that, I don’t even think Google can do that. Why? Because the most important thing is to write content that is engaging, informative & unique. Most of the time the person that knows the most about your business and product is you. You may need some guidance on what to focus on when you describe your business but otherwise, you will know what makes you better than the competition. Anyone on the internet that says otherwise I would be cautious of.
Publishing unoriginal content
You research on the internet about a topic you would like to put on your website, you see an excellent article that explains exactly what you are trying to say. You think to yourself “Great I will copy and paste this onto my webpage”. Only do this if you reference the website you are referring to, otherwise, your best option is to summarise what you understood in your own words.
Content that is automatically created – shadow domains
I remember in the early 2000s I would search for a topic and Google’s search results would bring a list of websites that seemed of a perfect fit, after clicking and taking me to the website I would find out that this was just a computer generated content with articulate words that didn’t make sense. I would try to leave this webpage and popups of advertising would continue to appear. It was a very frustrating experience. You don’t see any of this today, it is mainly because Google has removed these websites from the search results.
Affiliate content
Usually, this applies to resellers of a product or service. As an example, let us say I sell a new special diet pill that I call Super Kilos Diet, Guaranteed to Gain 2 Kilos a Week. I have my website with information on my product and I offer affiliates to sell for me for a very handsome commission. I have the website marketing all set up, all the affiliates need to do is copy and paste to their own website, they also have the option to change the name from Super Kilos Diet to their own name Diet.
Google would see these websites as the same and it may come across as spammy. The best way to avoid this is to create unique content that the other affiliate websites do not have.
Keyword domains and doorway pages
I was reading on the internet forums on how others managed to get #1 ranking search results. An interesting idea that sounded plausible was that they would register multiple domains with their service and suburb. For example. They owned a carpet cleaning business then they would register carpetcleaningmelbourne.com.au, carpetcleaningtoorak.com.au, carpetcleaningcaulfield.com.au. They would all link to the same carpet cleaning company. This is a bad idea. However, it may work if you set up only one keyword domain as your business. As soon as Google discovers they link to the same business, either by having the same phone number or email your search rankings will suffer.