Diagnosing Common SEO Mistakes

Just about every website we've looked at has at least one or two common SEO mistakes.  While diagnosing SEO mistakes isn't always straighforward, here are the warning signs that you've made a common SEO mistake.  The reasons may be more complex, so these are the horses rather than the zebras of website diagnostics (can you tell I'm totally addicted to House MD?) 

 Note, you may need to be able to access Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics to diagnose these on page optimisation mistakes.

SEO Alarm Bell 1:

 You’re not appearing in Google Search Results

 Common SEO mistakes you may have made:

•  Wrong keywords
• No links
• Bad links
• No anchor text
• Poor on page optimisation
• Poor web design

SEO Alarm Bell 2:

 All your traffic is coming from your brand name.

 Common SEO mistakes you may have made:

• No anchor text
• Poor on page optimisation
• Wrong keywords 

SEO Alarm Bell 3:

 Your SEOMoz  MozTrust score is lower than your MozRank score (see our DIY SEO ebook in our Online Marketing Brisbane section for more information) 

Common SEO mistakes you may have made:

• Too many spammy links (directories, forum and blog comments)
• Links to or from bad neighbourhoods (porn, gambling etc)
• Black hat SEO techniques
• Malicious code built into your web template
• Low quality web hosting

 SEO Alarm Bell 4:

 You have lots of backlinks pointing at your site but you're still failing in search results. 

Common SEO mistakes you may have made:

• Too many spammy links
• Too many no follow links
• No anchor text
• Black hat SEO
• All links are pointing to one single page
• All links have the same anchor text
• Poor web design or on page SEO 

SEO Alarm Bell 5: 

Your site suddenly plummets in Google ranking or in page rank. 

Common SEO mistakes you may have made:

• Black hat techniques have been detected by Google and you've been given a penalty 
• Your strongest backlinks have dropped out of the Google index
• Your strongest backlinks have been changed to "no follow"
• You haven't updated your website in a long time
• Your website topic became newsworthy and suddenly there's a lot of comptition for your slot 

For more information on diagnosing common SEO mistakes, check out our "What is SEO" section.

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