While the Digital Summit ended a little more than two weeks ago here in Atlanta, we’re still very much experiencing the buzz and “information” fallout provided by the conference speakers. Most people are still trying to find the best ways to survive the recent updates to the Facebook News Feed or Google’s Mobile Algorithm Update. But in my opinion, those developments are simply add-on questions to the real head-scratcher that is SEO.
My name is Christopher Hill and I am the Digital Content Strategist and Trainer for Digital Sherpa. There are a number of responsibilities that come with the role but one of the major ones is ensuring that our team of content marketers aren’t making detrimental SEO mistakes. So when Quinn Whissen, Marketing Manager of Vertical Measures, led a breakout session geared towards successfully optimizing content, I was all ears.
Her session was by far my favorite of the entire catalog because it spoke to a gap that I truly needed filled. Knowing how to properly perform quality SEO is as simple as knowing what mistakes you are or possibly could be making. I left Whissen’s session knowing the 10 most common SEO mistakes:
- Over Optimization
- Duplicate Meta Data
- Poorly Optimized Images
- Poor or Thin Content
- Keyword Misfocus
- Blocked Pages
- Bad Backlinks
- Page Load Time
- Penalties
- Unintentional Duplicate Content
Now if you’re familiar with the terminology, then you know just how easy it is to A.) make these mistakes and more importantly B.) fix them. In fact, half of these mistakes revolve around quality and the thoroughness of the work you’re doing. Duplicate Meta Data, for instance, was something that I was surprised to see make the list. But the more I thought about it, I remembered that most SEO packs allow this section to auto-populate from the text – so why couldn’t there be cases of unintentional automated duplication? Also, I knew that images were a big deal, but I didn’t realize how frequently that potential wasn’t being utilized – even within my own team.
However, one of the SEO mistakes that I wasn’t surprised to hear mentioned in Whissen’s session was the issue with thin and low-quality content. Ever since the Hummingbird update a while back, the need for hyper-helpful content has been at a premium. Gone are the days when you could simply crank out a keyword-rich post and expect to see it indexed favorably. Now there’s questions if Google even recognizes a piece of content under 300 words! Of course, some of the issues – like not being aware of pending penalties from Google and slow page loading times – were things that are more or less in the hands of our developers. However, this doesn’t make them less intriguing or less important for us to know as content marketers.
One thing that was made clear during the session with Whissen was that all of these mistakes are fixable, but only after you first identify the problem. A simple audit of our content showed me how much things have changed since last year alone. SEO has always been a tricky concept to navigate, especially with each additional update Google levies. But after a quick glance back at the list above, I am confident that remedying these problems will definitely lead to SEO success for 2015 and beyond.
(Image via Flickr)
