SEO Mistakes – Have You Been Hit by the Panda or the Penguin?

If you have been doing your own SEO and can’t seem to get ahead no matter what you try, the problem you are facing will generally fall into one of four very common mistakes. While some things are easy to fix and can be done on your own, others can take serious effort – even starting over from scratch. In a worst case scenario, you might be dealing with multiple issues at once. When that happens, it is time to get in touch with a reputable SEO firm and see what it is going to take to get you moving in the right direction.

One of the biggest problems you may be facing is with your content. Over optimized content that is stuffed with keywords or written more so for the bots than it is for actual people is always going to be a problem. It’s not that many webmasters cannot write decent content, it is that they don’t understand the finer points of creating SEO content like keyword density or even using the correct keywords to get the traffic they are trying to target. Add in that the content needs to be friendly to bots and to readers while doing all of this and providing good anchor text and it takes more time than many people are willing to invest.

A major problem is often link building. The tendency for many webmasters doing their own SEO is to grab any links they can from anywhere – even in batches of 100 or a 100 at a time. There are a couple glaring problems with this. One is that links should be relevant and the other is that building links too fast is a sure sign to Google bot that you aren’t growing organically. Either way you go, you lose. Link building is a gradual process and often best handled by an SEO firm.

Finally, a major issue is how you built your website to start with. Even though it is assumed everyone knows better by now, there are still new sites popping up that are built in Flash. Flash cannot be crawled, so the content cannot be indexed. This is actually the first thing you should look at if you are going nowhere with your rankings, but the odds are slim that this is your problem.

If you pinpoint any of these problems as to why your website is tanking, or especially if it is multiple issues, it is in your best interest to grab an SEO copywriter if applicable and an SEO firm to rework a new strategy for you so that you can get your site Google bot friendly and moving in a positive direction. Going the DIY route is always an option, but once you consider the time, effort and intricacies of getting a site back on solid footing, going with a professional is often the wisest option.