Business owners and SEO specialists spend a ton of time focusing on the right moves that they end up neglecting to avoid the wrong ones. Search engines have become so advanced today that they’re a lot more forgiving of what used to be considered SEO errors on the part of webmasters.
However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be mindful of optimization goofs. There are at least five major areas where you should take care in terms of SEO health in 2014.
1. Narrow Content Focus
The appearance of duplicate content is bad news for any SEO campaign but it can be easily rectified. A more difficult task is ensuring that your web properties boast the appropriate content breadth and depth.
Today, so-called “silo sites” have fallen out of favor with Google. Rather than over-optimizing a given site’s content, adopt a well-rounded content marketing strategy where individual content selections reinforce each other’s value.
2. Keyword Stuffing & Matching
It’s tough for the search engine giants like Google and Bing to completely rid their algorithms of a dependence on keywords. However, they’re looking less and less at keywords density as a way to gauge relevance.
Consequently, making minor tweaks to keyword density won’t help. Emphasize a few major keywords and augment them with plenty of supporting keywords that clarify the purpose of the content.
3. Weak Linking Practices
It’s unlikely that links will ever cease to be a major contributing factor in good SEO. After all, links are often the primary indicators of content quality and relevance.
However, the manner in which web resources should be linked together for optimal SEO impact changes from year to year. In 2014, you’ll need to focus on avoiding in-bound links from low-authority sites as well as exact-math anchor text.
4. Lack of Social Media Exposure
Today, social media clout is a major ingredient in Google’s overall ranking recipe. Ensuring that your content is seen and shared by as many people as possible via Facebook and Google+ is one of the easiest ways to boost organic SERPs results for any given publication.
Besides the benefit of gaining effortless backlinks, social media exposure proliferates your brand identity around the web and builds trust.
5. No Mobile Integration
An increasing percentage of the web-using populace accesses content via their mobile devices. As such, it’s critical that you make your content easy to consume by optimizing it for the mobile web.
It’s not difficult or expensive to convert a WordPress blog to mobile with handy tools like WP Mobile Edition. Delivering a smooth mobile experience will help your content to reach as many eyeballs as possible.
Staying Out of Danger
Obviously, the little things like meta tags, XML sitemaps and micro-formats still matter. Use Google Webmaster Tools to see what you’re doing wrong in this regard and correct any errors.
However, perfecting the technical details are less important than avoiding the major SEO mistakes delineated above. If you put out timely and useful content, share it with the right people and represent yourself honestly, your SEO will yield positive, lasting results.
