8 Common Mistakes Your Boss Expects You To Know About SEO

Imagine today you have instant access to tools on SEO that would put you in good stead with your boss. How much would you pay for it?

Well.. today you pay nothing for it.

In this article I am going to show you what are the 8 common mistakes that will help you dominate your SEO game.

To start all you need is an open mind, and the will to implement these changes. These tips are not technical, and can be followed through by anyone (even the layman).

What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quality and frequency of organic visits from a search engine.

It goes without saying that SEO is extremely important for any successful inbound lead generation campaign, and it is only logical that it should be approached with some best practices put in place.

SEO changes, and the history of the world's largest search engine Google speaks for itself. There are various factors which affect your website to be found through search.

This article works as a consolidated source which we have experimented on and find useful. 

1. Duplication

A common occurrence is when there is carbon copy content on your website in more than 1 page. It is having the content of about being duplicated in the corporate profile.

Having 2 of the same content on different domain extensions confuses the search engine. This means, the likelihood of your website being recommended on the 1st page on any search engine difficult.

2. Conflicting URLs

Clean up your links. Clean your URLs to show uniformity and structure, because a search engine will struggle to decipher the order of content on your website.

For example, avoid this:

• https://www.everworks.com/dedicated-server/
• https://www.everworks.com/Dedicated-Server/

For the more advanced you can read more about follow links from WordStream

3. Make your website mobile friendly

It has been widely covered that Google will rank websites which are mobile friendly higher compared to websites which aren't mobile friendly.

Google has a great tool here to test how mobile friendly your website is.

4. Sacrificing speed for looks

Speed is important and is a ranking factor on Google. Do not discount on hidden areas of your website which may contribute to your lack of speed. Less visitors, means that your website's speed affects your bottom line.

Here's a quick way for you to instantly improve your SEO.

5. Keyword stuffing

Do not stuff for keywords. Google has explicitly stated that this may affect your ranking on it's webpages.

According to Google, it's the act of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results.

6. Buying links

There is a strong sentiment within the society about paid link-building, and it's strongly advised that this isn't recommended.

Link-building is a great way to build a strong SEO. Pay attention to the quality of back-links. Rubbish links greatly affects the reputation of your website.

For further reading, we recommend an article from Moz, which covers a great article here about why link-building is important.

7. Forgetting the 'Alt' tag

Although there isn't an emphasis on ALT tags, there is a great opportunity for your photos to appear on search.

This is an alternative source of visitors to your website could be the image search on a search engine.

For example, DSC_001142.jpg compared to "Panasonic-Microwave-Below-Market-Price.jpg".

8. No emphasis on content building

Here's a fantastic resource on all of Google's ranking factors here.

Don't forget, search engines have an objective to deliver relevant, up-to-date, and quality content to people who search.

Conclusion

Commit to a SEO strategy and have faith to do the right things. Over time, optimizing for SEO would do more good for your website than bad.

Although, you are optimising for your SEO, don't forget your readers. Make it an easy experience for them with the right spacing, text separation, font size, etc.

Secret tip: Remember to fix any broken pages (404 pages) with a 301 redirect. You'll thank us later.

What's stopping you from committing to a SEO improvement campaign?

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3 SEO Secrets To Make You Become An Organic Powerhouse

SEO is everything to being discovered through search. What is the secret behind the search behemoth?

This continues to be elusive to most businesses embarking on their content development journey. Inbound lead generation seems to be a myth.

It can be demoralizing when your traffic sources start continues to be in a decline, that so much so it is in a plateau that never seems to go past zero.

Rather than hitting the eject button, we decided to scour the Internet for a solution and to find the culprit.

What we discovered is that our editorial strategy of brainstorming topics and relying on our intuition did not work.

We decided to pivot and focus our energies on the channel organic search. 

Here in this post we will share with you our 3 SEO secrets we've employed in our updated strategy as we deliver more relevant content to our readers.

Below is a brief outline of the 3 SEO Secrets:

1. People First, Search Engines Last
2. Link-Build
3. Compress Images

1. People First, Search Engines Last

Although the algorithm does dictate the result of search, you must remember that search engines reward for the best content on the internet, not for the best algorithm.

The 1st step we took is to understand the intent behind the keyword we want to target.

To do this we analyze a keyword's search engine's result and determine the problems that the users were trying to solve.

After which, we tried to find the best solutions to find the best steps to solving it. Finally we create engaging copy with clear, concise, and compelling copy.

We try to highlight findings, data, and include images that keep our readers stimulated for more.

2. Link-Build

Crucial to improving your domain authority, it is imperative for you to earn high-quality inbound links from websites and pages with high authority scores.

The main method we are currently using to earn high-quality links is by networking with other websites that have a higher domain score.

We are making every effort to also make sure our content is relevant to the referring website's content.

3. Compress Images

A basic rule for optimizing for search engines that often gets overlooked is compressing of your image files.

This may seem rudimentary and not a top priority but file size affects your website's load speed, which is 1 of 10 most important ranking factors for Google.

A great place to start on optimizing your page for Google is the guide prepared by them: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.

In a previous article we've covered a hidden trick to quickly and easily to enhance your SEO in Malaysia - this is a no brainer and can be done within 1 day.

Conclusion

These are the 3 secrets that we are currently devising as our SEO strategy, and continues to break records for us.

It's entirely possible that they could be outdated quick as SEO keeps changing and improving for the benefit of the users using the search engines.

How fast are you employing these new tactics?

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The Quickest and Easiest Way to Enhance Your SEO in Malaysia

Even the most skilled SEO professionals still have trouble positioning their businesses on search.

Why?

Search engines constantly evolve. Take Google for example, every algorithm change impacts all SEO strategies. This is ever more real for Malaysia SEO.

What used to work before, does not work today. Now, the devil is in the details.

There is a never ending list of possibilities that can effect your SEO. One detail we noticed, which is often overlooked, is in your choice of web host.

*In this article we'll use Google search as the guiding principle, because Google continues to maintain the largest market share for search globally at 90% (Business Insider Article). 

How does your choice of web host affect you? (4 ways your web host is affecting your rankings.)

1. Site Speed: This is important. Google places an emphasis on maintaining a good user experience. The best web hosting providers never slow you down.
2. Uptime: Ranking on Google is dependent on users finding your content relevant to the topic they are searching for. Having your website down often discourages users from relying on your content. The best web hosting providers ensure 99.9% uptime.
3. Server Location & Performance: This is directly related to Site Speed. The location of your servers relative to the location of your search audience affects your site speed. The best web hosting providers ensure servers which are always performance and location optimized to deliver results quickly to your search audience.
4. Backup to prevent Data Loss: Although remote, this does happen. Google needs to index your data for it to suggest relevant search results. Having no data affects your search ranking. The best web hosting providers automatically back up your data over intervals, ensuring you recover quickly.

Here's proof to support our claim.

Google has released a General Guideline to help us to understand what are the quality standards Google looks for when indexing a site.

Under "Help visitors use your pages": Google suggests the importance of optimizing your page load times (recommending these tools to check: PageSpeed Insights and Webpagetest.org).

Exercise: Find the best web hosting that will improve your Malaysia SEO.

Here we'll put it all together to help you:

1. Prioritize Site Speed, Uptime, Server Location & Performance, and Periodic Backups.
2. Choose a reputable web hosting provider that can scale as your internet needs grow. 
3. Price alone shouldn't influence your decision. Rest assured the web hosting space in Malaysia is very competitive and generally web hosting in Malaysia is affordable.
4. Find a web hosting provider in Malaysia that gives you service-level guarantees (SLAs). SLAs give you an additional layer of assurance.

If you are interested in what we do: 

We run a web hosting service in Malaysia which prioritizes Site Speed, Uptime, Server Performance, Free Backup and a 99.99% SLA. Learn more.

To learn more about Google and their algorithm changes:

1. MOZ covers the history of Google's algorithm change here..

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