Step 2 – Avoid These Mistakes

Ok, so now you have your site and you have gone through it and optimised your on page and checked that your content is good to go.

Before we get into the nitty gritty things I want you to pay close attention to this post, because it will save you a lot of time and a lot of money.

In 20 minutes you can learn from all of the F**k ups that I made. Believe me, I’ve made a lot of them, and there is nothing worse than watching your sites bouncing around the SERPS, somewhere between page 3 and page 10, bringing in no traffic and doing nothing except piss us off!

You would not believe how much time I have wasted on poor SEO. The one good thing that has come from it is that I have gained a vast amount of experience and I have learnt a lot about SEO.

Finally I am now in a position to get my SEO done properly and quickly, and if it goes tits up, I know exactly why and exactly how to put it right. So sit back and soak it in…..

 

1. DO NOT outsource your link building

What?… This one may surprise you because most people and businesses outsource their link building, and I don’t blame them really. Lets face it, there are thousands of SEO firms and individuals who claim they can get you to number 1.

You can buy packages that deliver high PR back links to your site, social links and even authority links.

The scenario usually goes like this. ‘Your site is doing piss poor in Google and you need to get it to number 1 for your keywords. You search around and find someone who can get it ranked highly and they make all sorts of guarantees!

It sounds great, and for a couple of hundred dollars you think,what the hell, it saves me a lot of time and I’ll get good rankings.

A few months down the line your site is still ranking number 87!!!. You then move onto something else or give up all together. I’ve been here many times. If you haven’t then well done, just make sure you stay away.

The worst culprits for link building and SEO are Elance and Odesk. There are literally thousands of people on their offering low cost SEO, 99% are form foriegn countries such as India and the Philippines. They can often work for 2-3$ per hour and they have good skills, however, I have used these many times before.

I have hired people from the far east to do SEO on one of my sites. Results have never been good, although they do actually go out and do the link building, I find that they are stuck in 2006. What worked then does not work now.

Another thing is that I can’t trust them in regard to where they are building these back links from. Any type of spam can  see your site getting a big slap from Google.

I had a case once where a guy was building sone niche related blog comments for me. He basically messed up and posted comments on completely the wrong sites and build far to many.

I then got slapped because my anchor txt diversity was way to high. I have many stories like this but I won’t bore you with all of them.

The main reason why I suggest that you do ALL of your back links yourself is so that you have total control over them. You know exactly where they are coming from, what your anchor txts are, your diversity etc..  Basically you know your metrics and if something goes wrong you have the power to get it removed and solved quickly. More on this later.

 

2. Relevant Niche Links

Google has made it clear that its not the amount of links you build but its the quality of the links. Lets say your in the Travel niche. It would be much better to have 1 or 2 links from a well respected site in the travel nice, that it would to have 100 links from random sources. This is a big mistake that many people and SEO’s make.

Its all well and good building links, but they must be niche related links.  I have wasted a lot of time in the past building links that have no relevance and it’s possible that these links will do more harm than good!

There are a number of ways to obtain good quality back links and I will explain all of this later in the series. Whenever I start a link building campaign I always use niche related links

 

3. Over Optimising on page

This is something you used to get away with back in the day, however Google has clamped down on over optimisation. I remember the days when all I had to do to rank well was to stuff my page with the keyword. Use it in the Heading and images and everywhere else it can go.

Nowadays this will get you a penalty and your site will go toppling down the SERP’s. If you did this now it would be very poor SEO practice. You should already know this by reading Step 1, but I ad to throw it in there because I see it happen so often!

 

4. Over Optimised Link profile (Keyword percentage too high)

This is something I have got wrong a ton of times and I have been slapped for it! It is often the number 1 culprit when people ask me why their site has suddenly disappeared off the search engines.

I run a back link check and I find that the keyword that they are trying to rank for makes up something like 72% of there total backlink anchors. Google see’s this as an attempt to trick it’s algorithms and they penalise you for ‘over optimisation’. I have had it happen on my own sites,  even with a 30% diversity!

This is a big problem for the inexperienced SEO wannabes! but rest assured, we have it covered here and I will explain exactly what to do to build a diversified back link structure that looks totally natural and won’t get penalised by google!

Check out my post on ranking a new site, This shows you how to combat over optimisation!

Can you recover once you have been hit by this?

Yes you can. I have seen sites bounce around all over the place depending on the keyword diversity. If this is the case for you then you need to build more variable links and natural links such as ‘click here’ ‘visit’ ‘go to’ ‘check this out’. Doing this will lower your main keyword percentage and hopefully see your site moving back up the SERP’s

 

5. Building links too quickly

Another sign that you are up to no good is building backlinks too quickly. If you have 10 links today and tomorrow you have 2000, then Google will raise its flag and see that you are trying to manipulate your rankings. Getting hundreds or thousands of links in a short space of time is not natural.

Link building is a slow process that has to be done overtime so that it is natural to the search engines. If you have ever been on Fiverr you will see tons of gigs that promise to get you a 1000 high PR backlinks or build you a link wheel with tons of links. A word of warning, stay well clear of these.

In fact stay clear of Fiverr all together when it comes to SEO. The only thing I find it good for is Video creation and logo designs.

 

There you have it. My 5 biggest SEO mistakes. Just by avoiding these mistakes you are well on your way to better rankings. Join us in Step 3 to see exactly how to plan out your attack!

If you are trying to rank a niche affiliate site then check out this post. It will be very valuable to you

 

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> Step 3 – Build powerful manual web 2.0 properties