These are some of the common mistakes a lot of people make; contrary to usual beliefs, the following practices may be doing more harm than good.

Keyword stuffing: The popular misconception is that the more keywords there are in the page content, a search engine will be fooled into thinking that it is more relevant. This may have been true in the past, but Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, which came about in 2011 and 2012 respectively, have moved the world’s most popular search engine closer to natural language processing; and Hummingbird, introduced in 2013, is far from an update – it has a completely new search algorithm that takes Google even further in this regard. Moreover, keyword stuffing results in your page/site being marked as spam.

Poor choice of keywords: For the best results with Search Engine Optimization, you need to include the keywords that are most commonly searched for your product or line of business. And to find out which these top keywords are, you can use keyword search tools for your page(s) as well as that of your competitors – these should tell what are the keywords that visitors to your site (or that your competitors) type in before coming there. Did you know that 93% of all web traffic comes in through search engines?

Linking: Another misconception is that that the more outbound links there are, the more ‘active’ it makes your page seem to search engines, which then rank it higher than ‘static’ pages without any outbound links. In reality, the search engines also take into account the quality of the links. If it links to a page or site that is rated poorly by search engines because of advertising, spam or generally inaccurate information; then that reflects back on your page as well. So think twice about jumping on to the new bandwagon of content marketing; where you generate articles about your product or service, disguise them as news articles, and post them on content farms or mills, linking your main page/website to them. It doesn’t make your site more reputed or authoritative, but can have the opposite effect.

Duplicate content: If the content across your pages looks similar, then search engines are left confused as to which page they should rank over the other and show in their search results – they don’t want to be showing multiple links to your site when a user searches for a keyword or a specific set of keywords. Search engines see this as an attempt to befuddle them and this lowers your search engine rankings.