SEO Mistake: Design and develop your web site without considering SEO.
Instead: Make sure your website design is search engine friendly, so search engines can easily get to every significant page on your site. Be responsive and mobile-friendly. Avoid graphical text. Do keyword analysis first, because often the keywords you find you need to target will influence the pages you need on your site. And they will certainly influence the content.
SEO Mistake: Use the same Page Title tag on every page. And include your company name at the beginning of it.
Instead: Craft a unique Title tag for every page, using the most important keywords for the page in the Title tag. Use your company name only on the Title tag for your home page, your about us page, and your contact page. If you must use it on other pages, place it at the end of the Title tag.
SEO Mistake: Target general keywords that are extremely competitive because they get a lot of searches.
Instead: Target more focused keywords. It’s better to rank #4 for “adoption lawyer” than #50 for “lawyer”. In the end, the former will generate more traffic to your web site.
SEO Mistake: Request links with your URL in the anchor text. (Anchor text is the text in the link itself that someone clicks on.) E.G., don’t do this: www.RankMagic.com.
Instead: Use almost anything else as anchor text, preferable a keyword phrase for the page. E.G., NJ SEO company.
SEO Mistake: Ignore your inbound link profile.
Instead: Recognize that your authority on the web is a critical ranking factor, and that it’s measured by the number and quality of incoming links from other websites.
SEO Mistake: When link building, request the same anchor text from all linking web sites.
Instead: Vary what the anchor text says to include your most important keywords.
SEO Mistake: Request all incoming links to your home page.
Instead: Request incoming links to all of the pages you’re optimizing. And make sure the anchor text contains at least one of the keywords for that page. E.G., local SEO for small businesses. Consider offering anyone who might link to you a choice of what to use for anchor text.
SEO Mistake: Expect fast results.
Instead: Understand that organic or natural SEO doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a minimum of 3-4 months to see any results at all, and full realization can take a year or more.
Bonus SEO Mistake
SEO Mistake: Optimize it and forget it.
Instead: Periodically check that people are still searching for your keywords frequently, and see if new keywords have become more popular. If so, adapt your SEO strategy accordingly. Also, check your rankings occasionally (quarterly, monthly) so you’ll know if they start to slip. New, aggressive competition and search engine algorithm changes might result in your rankings dropping. If you don’t check, you can’t react to it. Check Google Analytics to make sure your traffic is steady or increasing. If it drops, you need to fix something.