SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an on going thing. You can’t expect to complete a round of SEO campaign and have your site appear at the top of search results forever. To continue performing well SEO-wise, your site needs to be improved continually as well. Sadly, the mistakes you make will also reflect on your SEO performance. Which are the most common SEO mistakes you should avoid?

Keyword Stuffing

This is a classic SEO mistake many ‘experts’ still make. As sad as it may sound, there are still a lot of web owners that stuff their articles with keywords, hoping the articles will perform well SEO-wise. The truth is, this type of articles are now blacklisted from search results.

Instead of stuffing your articles with keywords, write valuable contents that users can actually read and benefit from. The more time your users spend browsing your site, the better your SEO performance will be.

Broken Links

Almost all websites accumulate broken links over time; this is a natural thing that occurs as changes are made to the websites. Although broken links are not uncommon, they are still very annoying for users and search engine crawlers alike.

The good news is, you can now use web services and tools to help you scan broken links and remove them. Google Webmaster Tools is a good place to start. Other tools such as SEOMoz and Pingdom helps review your site’s performance in general, including how the broken links impair your user’s experience.

Copied Contents

Search engine crawlers are now smarter than ever. They can identify not only copied text, but also stolen images and duplicate content. When these things are found on your site, your search engine rankings will drop substantially.

Producing high quality content is not an easy task to complete, but that doesn’t mean you should copy articles from other sites. At the very least, you should rewrite the articles so that search engine crawlers see them as original.

You should also try to write shorter articles instead of pushing yourself to write long contents. Not only will you be spending less time on writing the contents, you will also find it much easier to be consistent in updating your site.

Meta Keyword Tags

This next mistake may not be so obvious, but it is a mistake nonetheless. Webmasters and site owners are still using Meta Keyword tags for SEO purposes. This is wrong for several reasons:

• Search engines no longer weight Meta Keyword tags as an essential element, so they are rather obsolete in today’s SEO scene.
• The Meta Keyword tags reveal the keywords you are targeting. These keywords can be picked up by your competitors, allowing them to figure out your SEO strategy without so much as a problem.
• You are adding more lines to your page. When you start adding a lot of keywords to the tag, you are actually slowing your site down.

Now that you know about the negative effects of using Meta Keyword tags, it is time to remove them from your header for better SEO performance.