Do you make these common search engine optimisation (SEO) mistakes? Entrepreneur Neil Patel highlights five SEO pitfalls and how to avoid them.
#1: You can be rich, but not filthy rich … in anchor text
The best way to boost your rankings is to build rich anchor text links. For example, if MashMedia wants to rank well for the term “Media Conference” I need to get other websites to link to MashMedia.
When convincing these sites to link to me, I ideally want them to link with the phrase Media Conference as the link text instead of my company name, MashMedia.
If more people link to you with the keyword you want to rank for as the anchor text of the link, your rankings will start sky rocketing for that keyword.
But what you may not know is that if you get too many links that are rich in anchor text, your rankings will drastically drop after a while. So you have to rotate the anchor text up and ideally make it natural.
In essence, having rich anchor text is good, but it can’t be too rich. You should try to keep your anchor text rich for less than 10% of your links.
#2: Don’t ignore internal pages
When you are optimising your website for search engines, although it’s common for you to optimise the code on all pages of your website, for some reason you tend to forget about building links to your internal pages.
Your homepage is important, but having 100% of your links to your homepage is really unnatural.
You should try to make sure that 80% of your links, if not more, are going to internal pages. And the best way to do this is to make sure your internal pages have really good content.
What you’ll notice when your internal pages start to get more links, the ranking of your homepage will also start going up. It’s because search engines don’t just try to evaluate where you should rank on a page-by-page basis, but they also look at your website as a whole. This is why sites like About.com and Wikipedia rank for millions of terms.
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