There are a lot of lists of SEO mistakes out on the internet but these ones are straight from the horse’s mouth, by which we mean Google, and they aren’t the standard ones you’ve probably seen time and time again before.
The first two in fact tell you a lot about Google and the way they see websites, they realize they are marketing tools for business and that they must be a part of companies wider marketing, this in turn makes websites more relevant and useful presumably.
1. Google’s first point is to avoid the mistake of having no value proposition, a mistake often listed in marketing mistakes lists but less often associated with SEO mistakes. Google’s argument is though that by knowing why your site should be number one for a keyword you should be able to come up with better pages and more relevant content, good for you, good for searchers and good for Google then.
2. Secondly Google champion an SEO and marketing department that are integrated, and know what each other are doing. This is also then a piece of advice often given in marketing mistakes lists, it is true though and SEO departments often don’t know what they are really trying to achieve. It is worse with a out of house SEO agency who your marketing department or agency don’t communicate with, give an SEO agency a loose brief and they will probably just bring you any vaguely relevant traffic. By making sure whoever is doing your SEO know that you want to attract customers in certain areas for example, with a clear buying intention, SEO and website people can make sure that landing pages are optimized and keywords carefully chosen.
3. Google extol the virtues of doing things properly, i.e don’t use a hack to try and save time rather than following best practice. For a start a lot of black hat type hacks will get picked up by Google if they become too common and you will then have to either come up with another hack or follow the best practice you should have done to begin with. The example Google gave interestingly was changing the timestamp on a URL to get it crawled more quickly rather than submitting the URL through Fetch as Googlebot.
4. Google’s fourth thing to avoid was getting caught in an SEO trend, another very good piece of advice. Often those new to SEO suffer from these most of all or those looking for a quick fix to their website’s poor rankings: they rarely live up to expectations. The white hat techniques that have always worked will continue to work, content will always improve rankings. Don’t then invest time in changing some small detail in every one of your site’s meta descriptions but focus on creating good quality, relevant content.
5. Google with their last point though seem to almost go back on their fourth point, as well as not following the latest fads and trends you should it seems have a website that is agile and allows you to quickly test improvements. Best practice does change over time and you will want to change your site from time to time, getting caught in a trend can be time consuming and wasteful but if you are going to follow a trend that may or may not work it is good to have a website that you can implement the change on quickly and easily: for this WordPress and other platforms with plenty of regularly updated plug-ins are by far the best.
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