9 SEO Mistakes That I Had To Rectify Recently

Even before I actually started my car rental company, I was aware of the importance of promoting the business online. I had done a short professional course on web promotions, and naturally, deemed that I could handle all the search engine marketing requirements of my company. This, however, was a big mistake – since I was not familiar with the ongoing changes in the various search engine algorithms. Frustrated with the position of my website on Google for my focus keyword (a pathetic 170!), I decided to hire the services of a professional SEO company in Kolkata. The experts from the company pointed out the mistakes that I was making:

a)      Building too many, sub-standard links – Search engine optimization has always been all about link-building to me – the more the number of backlinks, the better it is for my website. However, this practice had long lost its utility – and greater focus is now placed on the quality of links that are being built. The expert on internet marketing in Kolkata suggested the names of only five high-quality directories, where I could submit articles to get backlinks.

b)      Overstuffing of keywords – I had two major keywords (‘car rental company’ and ‘car rental service’) – and I splashed them about liberally on each of my web pages. One of the first things that the search engine optimizer did was to reduce the keyword density from the pages. Instead, variants of these two keywords were used – for the different web pages. Thanks to them, my website no longer has any keyword spamming!

c)       Using the same anchor text – I had two keywords – so of course, I was building backlinks from them only. Little did I know that, the absence of proper anchor text diversification was pushing back the rank of my website on the Google SERP. Thankfully, I had chosen one from the top search engine marketing companies in the country – and their team of internet marketers easily created as many as 17 variants of my two focus keywords – which could be used to build backlinks.

d)      Poor onpage content quality – I am no web content developer, and had basically jotted down the main features of my business (types of cars, charges, rules & regulations, etc.) on my website. That, however, was hardly enough to retain the interests of the web visitors – who were quickly navigating away from my website. The SEO company in India offered content writing services as well – and now, each of my web pages has unique, keyword-optimized, engaging content. Business leads have increased too!

e)      Creating links only to the home page – I had (naively!) assumed that, if I manage to bring visitors to the home page of my website, they would automatically check out the other pages. As the website metrics later proved, this was not happening, however. To tackle this problem, my chosen provider of SEO services in India suggested creating backlinks to the internal pages as well – using the different variants of the main keywords. No longer is the visitor behavior on my website as skewed as before.

f)       Not checking the speed of my website regularly – I did not face much problems in getting corporate partners for my business. Unfortunately, I had decided to put up their ads in the ‘above-the-fold’ section of the home page of my website. What’s more – I had used a couple of flash banners as well (deeming that they would look stylish). Both of these factors were making my website slow to load – which, in turn, resulted in a mounting ‘bounce rate’. The number of advertisements has now been reduced, and the flash animations have been removed. My website loads much more quickly too!

g)      Not getting into content marketing – Creating onpage content and writing a few articles for submission was all that I could do – the strategy of content marketing had never even occurred to me. The internet marketing firm I had selected lived up to its reputation as the bestSEO company in Kolkata, by familiarizing me w

ith the concept of guest blogging. They created high-quality content (with keywords), and approached professional bloggers to publish them on their sites – and give a backlink in return. My website ended up getting four links from .edu sites!

h)      My website lacked a dynamic feel – Rows of pictures of cars, and then paras of textual content – that’s all my website had earlier. Come to think of it, I should have realized that it would appear boring to visitors (heck, it even seemed boring to me!). The design experts from the search engine marketing company added informative videos, more relevant pictures, and interesting infographics to my website. A separate blog section was added too – where weekly posts are made.

i)        Not having any exposure on the social media channels – Social media marketing has become one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization – but I had totally glossed over this fact. The SEO consultant created engaging profiles for my business on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I was also advised to open a personal account on Google Plus, to promote my business. For picture-sharing, a Pinterest account was started too.

The officials from the SEO company in Kolkata also made each of my page URLs short, compact and search engine-friendly. The website was made mobile-optimized as well. Thanks to their ongoing efforts, my website has consistently featured among the top ten results on Google (for 15 of the 19 keywords) for the last nine months – and business profitability figures have also skyrocketed!