The Biggest SEO Mistake

[espmartin]

There are tons of mistakes you can make in your SEO. From blackhat use, to
greyhat (you know, the keyword stuffing you did when you didn't know better )
use, to bad neighborhood linking, etc... the list goes on and on.

But the biggest mistake I see for SEO is a simple one: it's neglecting to
stay in tune of the market trend pertaining to your specific niche.

 

[cooldude007]

I've committed lots of mistakes previously, but now I'm on the right track....Today, I'm doing some experimentals if the technique will work or not...Discard if not effective and use if worthy....

 

[BenjArriola]

Keyword stuffing worked for me in 1999.

 

[SkinnerW]

Once I had a site that was ranking on the first page for most of my targeted terms. Than for some reason I changed some titles here and there (can't remember why) and site was dropped 7-8 pages deep.

The point: don't fix what is not broken...

 

[technologyslice]

In order to stay competitive you have to adapt to the changing environment.

 

[deal4412]

Expecting to put your keywords on the homepage and rank #1 is another common mistake by newbies. On page optimization is only %5 of what it takes...getting quality inbound links is obviously much more important.

 

[eli03]

Expecting to put your keywords on the homepage and rank #1 is another common mistake by newbies.

i'm not sure but putting a keyword on homepage give a boost to a site specially for non-competitive keywords even without link building.

 

[wyzemoro]

i think and believe auto-submitting to some 1000+ directories will hurt your site rank and this directory is not as the same niche you trying to build up.

 

[tim75]

I once auto-submitted to 100 directories only to realise I had misspelled my sites title (anchor text) in the auto submission software. On the plus side I ranked really well for the phrase golf blgo for a while (I still don't know how I missed it)

 

[edcanape]

SEO Mistake

> some seo do not define seo campaign goals, metrics and baseline
> some seo do not measure seo campaign results

 

[kineticdc]

letting a web designer do my seo work is my biggest mistake.

 

[arora]

still learning the ropes - but i thought it's the quantity not quality that matters?

correct me if i am wrong?

 

[vicdigi]

Expecting to put your keywords on the homepage and rank #1 is another common mistake by newbies. On page optimization is only %5 of what it takes...getting quality inbound links is obviously much more important.

Deal, I can only disagree with you on this point.

Let us take a look at at all the successful websites. We're talking websites that have content. Oftentimes people use the phrase "Content is King".

What do they exactly mean by that. It is all very well having 5000 backlinks to your website but this can only work well with search engines for a while.

If you have 5000 pages on your website all with good unique content then overtime this will beat the backlinks time and time again.

With the your website having that amount of good content pages, there is every possibility your backlinks will climb anyway through your internal pages linking back to you site.

On another note; I think all of us at one point or another has made mistakes along the way, especially at the beginning. It is part of the learning and nothing to be ashamed of.

What to do is take every mistake you have made and treat it as a valuable lesson.

 

[Théo B.]

"Disallow: /" was my worst error :'(
I made another, linking h**p://3w.domain and h**p://domains, but it is less important...

 

[SkinnerW]

"Disallow: /" was my worst error
...

I usually do this stuff when working on new sites and sometimes forget to remove this line from robots.txt file also...

This is a suiside :death:

 

[smeagain]

My biggest SEO Mistake ever was about 7 years ago at a time when I was too hungry to be fussy. I accepted a clients brief from their marketing department who were not at all net savvy. Part of the brief was to chase a set of Keywords/Prases that were quite clearly put together in "Comittee" and read like a dictionery or thesaurus. They were obviously very much afraid of missing something out.

Well I took it on with no promises of positions to be achieved, just that I would obtain "Substantial Improvement". Needles to say that even though I achieved very good growth in visitors for the targetted phrases that were pertinent to their products and services, the fact that some of their really obscure search phrases did not improve in the SERPs, they felt that I had not delivered. This lead to ill feeling and me walking away from a sizeable client.

The lesson learned then and not deviated from since is:
Hold a "Clients Needs Annalysis" and agree the objectives. If a sensible set of objectives can't be agreed, walk away then and let somebody else get the grief that results in chasing rainbows.

 

[Drabdesign]

My biggest mistake was updating my main site just as a power cut happened, knocking out my Router et al.

 

[pogung177]

SEO Mistake

> some seo do not define seo campaign goals, metrics and baseline
> some seo do not measure seo campaign results

I agree with you, all depend your style to optimazing your site, including measure competitor rank.

 

[seo_india]

There are tons of mistakes you can make in your SEO. From blackhat use, to
greyhat (you know, the keyword stuffing you did when you didn't know better )
use, to bad neighborhood linking, etc... the list goes on and on.

But the biggest mistake I see for SEO is a simple one: it's neglecting to
stay in tune of the market trend pertaining to your specific niche.

The biggest mistake I did was submission of my articles to around 200-500 article websites.

It triggered duplicate content penalty. Google assumed that my own site is using duplicate content. :no:

Since then I have never indulged in article promotion or I would call it duplicate content promotion :bullshit:

Unless and until you receive back link from your own published article, you are at a great risk of receiving duplicate penalty.

 

[Aletheides]

Mistakes:

Not varying anchor text for my backlinks so they look more natural (ie. always having my target keyword in the anchor)

Not paying attention to keyword density.