7 Deadly SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2016

Singapore has a very active internet population with varied interests who are avid to be internet marketers. This presents an ideal opportunity for internet marketers to create effective SEO campaigns that are in tune with the online habits and behaviour of the Singaporean. Getting your website found by the search engines requires basic SEO. When your site is properly optimized you will see substantial improvement in traffic to your site and ultimately more sales. For 2016 and beyond, keep in mind that the end goal for any Search Engine is to provide the user with an answer, a resolution to their problem as quickly and easily as possible. There are many ways to utilize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in your marketing campaign. While there are many great methods to utilize this effect marketing method there are some common SEO mistakes you should avoid. These mistakes are often made by those new to this way of marketing or in the process of learning it. Find out what are the top 7 deadly SEO mistakes to avoid in 2016: 

– Bad SEO Techniques:
Looking at the industry jargon, updates, rules, and latest algorithms, it is no wonder that so many make SEO mistakes. There are certain techniques out there that are considered bad SEO or ‘black hat’ SEO methods. These are methods for tricking the search engines and they’re black hat because they expressly go against the rules. Some of these methods are actually illegal. I want to share these with you just in case you’re doing any of them, and tell you to watch out! You can actually find forums where people are discussing this stuff. Some of it borders on hacker talk. And the funny thing is that they’re all suspicious of each other all the time! It can be a real hoot. 

– Invisible Text:
You can put ‘invisible’ text on your website. This is text that human eyes don’t see but search engine spiders do. One way is to have text that’s the same colour as the background. Or there can be text that’s way off to the side and nobody would know it was there if they didn’t hunt for it. The text could be just a bunch of random keywords. Users can’t see this text but bots can. People did this a lot several years ago and, of course, the bots got wise to it. Now they see it as a warning sign that you’re spamming people. They’ll find it and ban your site. By being aware of and potentially correcting these avoidable SEO mistakes, you can better optimize your brand’s SEO strategy.

– Bad Backlinks:
Backlinks are going to still be the big thing in 2016. There are lots of backlink techniques that people used to use often, and that are now against the rules. One of them is paid backlinks. You would pay people to backlink to your site and this would theoretically raise your rank in Google. Another was the old link swap. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. What would often happen is that the link to your site would end up on a page that was just a huge list of links. Pure garbage by Google’s standards. The whole problem with this method is that you have links coming in to your site from sites that are not relevant to your site. This looks suspicious to Google. They banned the practice and if they catch you doing it, they’ll ban you too.

– Using Too Many Images:
Using text for headings and menus helps search engines more easily discover whatever they are looking for. Although images may make your site look good, keep in mind that search engines cannot read images. Because of the inability of the search engines to read your images, having too many images has a zero effect on improved rankings. SEO offer businesses written content and not pictures for a reason. Pictures do not help Search engines understand what your site is about and index them accordingly. In 2016, SEO is going to mean quality and diversification. While pictures do help the site look better and give readers a break between content, a business website cannot be about the pictures alone; this is not effective search engine optimization.

– Low Quality Content: 
Everyone makes mistakes, but SEO mistakes can be costly. Irrelevant or poorly laid out content can be an SEO killer. A lot of companies try and stuff as many keywords as possible in their content but this disrupts the natural flow and makes it nearly unreadable. Google, in particular, looks poorly on sites that do not have high quality and original content. If they feel that your content is not suitable then they will move your site down on the search results list pages. You can fix this problem by including e-commerce reviews, as customers will be writing their own opinion on a product so that content will be unique to them. You can also improve your content by hiring SEO copywriters who will write your content to a high standard and will work in keywords naturally. I believe 2016 will be the year when high quality content become a ranking factor for search result.

– Keyword Stuffing:
Keyword density will be so important for SEO in 2016. I wish that people knew better, but still lots of marketers stuff their content. If having the right keywords gets you Google love, then having MORE of those keywords gets you MORE love, right? Wrong! Keyword stuffing doesn’t make your site look more relevant to Google. It makes it look spammy. Anyway, keyword density is just one of the many factors that the search engines look at. Readability is another. Use your keywords tastefully so that it reads well and doesn’t look stuffed. SEO mistakes can be very hard to correct, and take quite a bit of time and expense. For this reason, we want to be ultra-careful to use keyword.

– Mirrors and Cloaking:
A mirror site or mirror page is one that contains duplicate content but a different URL. These are designed to game the search engine spiders and it doesn’t work. Since this is a blatant black hat SEO strategy and spiders are now trained to look for it, don’t do it. A similar method is cloaking. This means presenting one site to spiders and another site to users. There are very clever ways to do this, but unfortunately, spiders are cleverer. This will get your site banned.

SEO mistakes can result in stiff penalties by search engines. These days, search engines, especially Google, have become stronger than ever. They constantly tweak the algorithms to preserve and enhance the integrity of the natural search results. Therefore, the old dirty tricks would now do more harm than good to your rankings. It can even destroy all of your efforts if you do it wrong. If you’re not doing any SEO yet, start today or be left behind. By 2016, depending on the sector you are in, most if not all your competitors will be doing at least some SEO.