Biggest Mistakes of SEO First Timers

There’s a lot of bad information out there about SEO. Not to mention, what might have been a good tactic last year is, in many cases, no longer helpful.

How does a first timer in SEO know what to do?

Mistakes are easy to fall into and they can hurt your chance to show up in the search engines. It’ll also make SEO seem like a frustrating waste of time.

For this exact reason, make sure you stay away from these common mistakes...

Have Reasonable Expectations!

This has to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest mistake, someone new to SEO will fall into. Oftentimes, when someone first sits down and thinks, “what do I want to be found for?”, they go with something obvious to them.

For example, if you work in the mortgage industry and do loans in California, it makes sense to want to be found anytime anyone in California searches for a mortgage.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy. If you think about how many people do mortgages in California and also want to be found for that search, well, that’s your competition. The more competitive a search term is, the harder it will be to get prominent placement.

Going after less competitive terms, or being patient and working hard for more competitive terms, is a much more realistic goal.

It can be extremely disheartening when you work for certain goal and not see any progress, so know what you are up against before you start your work.

There are no SEO Shortcuts!

Just like most things in life, there are no shortcuts. You might find different articles or certain SEO companies claiming they’ve figure out some magic shortcut… don’t believe them.

Search engines are very aggressively fighting anything they view as an attempted shortcut. Not only will they not help you, they will actually hurt you, and could result in your website being removed from search engines all together.

Common SEO shortcuts to avoid are:

• Paying for backlinks
• Stealing content from other sites and putting it on yours
• Not taking the time to write robust and high quality, unique content
• Including too many keyword phrases in your content, otherwise known as “keyword stuffing”
• Spamming social media sites and blogs with links back to your website