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In the process of trying to improve your SEO, you may have actually been making things worse without realising it. The SEO tips you can find online can be a valuable resource but believing everything you read surrounding the topic, especially outdated content, has potential to be ruining your SEO.

Being a digital marketing agency, we’ve seen a lot of SEO mistakes in our time!

Keep reading to find out the most common SEO mistakes you might be making…

Using Outbound Links Incorrectly

Over the years webmasters have grown to fear outbound links, which is why many think guest posting is a dead technique, but this isn’t the case. If you have links to external sites in your navigation that aren’t your social media profiles, then yes – these could be seen as spam by Google and should be removed. However, naturally linking to a resource of information or an author in the body of the text will do you no harm as long as you quality check the URL you are linking to.

Not Using Outbound Links

Outbound links aren’t the enemy; they can actually make your content more valuable! Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, has even said that outbound links “can bring value to your content and that in turn can be relevant for us in search”. So whilst outbound links aren’t necessarily a direct ranking factor, they sure hold some weight in improving the quality of your content so we shouldn’t fear outbound linking.

Incorrect URL Architecture

Your URL structure should be at the forefront of your mind when developing a new site, the way your URLs are structured have a major impact of your SEO and any changes should be made with caution as to not undo your other SEO elements. Whilst creating pages and blog posts many errors can occur, including:

• Listing blog posts under multiple categories which creates duplicate content as the same blog post is listed in more than one category folder
• All URL’s coming off the parent domain with no other categorisation. Whilst your priority pages should come straight off the parent domain, further subpages and subcategories should be categorised further to create a clear URL structure
• URL’s where the parent folder results in a 404 error page can be confusing to users as for example, the user would expect www.example.com/cafe to be accessible if the URL structure for the café menu is www.example.com/cafe/menu
• URLs that make no logical sense and contain only numbers and letters. URL’s are helpful to both search engines and users; they should be able to know what your page is about before clicking on the URL. For example, www.weareinfront.com/seo-management/ contains much more useful information than www.weareinfront.com/sfdg7848645

Incorrect Use Of Image Alt Tags

Search engines can’t interpret images so image alt attributes allow you to provide a text alternative for not only search engines but for visually impaired users who use computer technology to read the text on the screen aloud to them. However, webmasters often use the alt tags incorrectly by stuffing them with keywords. If the alt tag should naturally include a keyword then that is fine but above all the alt tag should explain what is happening in the image.