Search engine optimization (SEO) is easier said and done, such that more often than not, people tend to make a lot of mistakes in implementing it. There are many ways for you to go wrong when it comes to applying SEO to your website so that you can get higher search engine results page (SERP) rankings.

SEO is a skill that requires practice to master, but it's also something that should be done right or else you'll be wasting your efforts every time. The tricky thing about SEO is that what used to be considered as a valid means of gaining traffic can be considered as spam by the next Google Panda or Penguin update  so you should always be updated on what SEO technique is considered as fair game.

Wrong Choice of Keywords and Putting on the Wrong Title

If you select the wrong keywords, you'll target the wrong audience... that is, visitors who have no interest in buying whatever it is you're selling. That's dangerous because these people will waste your bandwidth, yet you'll have nothing to show for it in the form of profits and sales.

There are also times when you try to rank high at related keywords, but they're the wrong keywords for you to choose because they're so highly competitive, thus you'll rank quite low that it wouldn't matter with them. You should find local keywords to rank for and build your way up to more common keywords so that slowly but surely, you'll end up getting keyword rankings that are more than your money's worth.

As for the title, you should ensure that it's correct, or else there's a chance that you'll be flagged as a site with a misleading title or content. Everything in your website, from the title to the materials, should be geared towards relevancy. They shouldn't at all contradict each other. The more unified and relevant your site is to a given theme or motif, the less likely it will be considered as spam by Google Penguin or Panda. Besides which, one of the most basic tenets of effective web development is to have a site that has uniform and consistent branding, so having any element that contradicts the established content of your site should be discarded from the get go.

Maintaining Your Website and Avoiding Spam Linkage

There's a reason why your SEO is best utilized during the development stages of your site instead of when it's already published, and it's the fact that SEO techniques must be ingrained into your content itself in order to make significant headway in SERP rankings and whatnot. Otherwise, you'll have trouble trying to include SEO in your already finished site; sometimes, it's like trying to fit a square peg into a circular hole or vice-versa. SEO is a long-term investment, not a quick fix. Therefore, you must deal with SEO deliberately.

You must be consistent in adjusting your SEO so that your SERP ranking will always stay high or go higher. SEO is not something you can apply and then forget about afterwards. With that said, you should beware of spam links too. What this means is that you shouldn't exchange links with questionable sites that put your URL in thousands of directories, because Google at present considers such actions as questionable and spam-like. You should instead concentrate on your search signals, internal links, and social network marketing (SEM).

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