The path of the entrepreneur is a long and winding one. It’s a road upon which success and prosperity seem to hover intangibly on the horizon, yet the road itself is treacherous and almost always uphill. Keeping your footing on this road is often precarious and the prospect of landing flat on your face seems to hover in the periphery of your thoughts at every moment. After all, 9 out of 10 travelers on this same road fall flat on their faces. While some are able to pick themselves up again, your every instinct screams at you to keep your footing. In this mindset, SEO can seem like a lifeline – an all important helping hand to stabilize you and pull you further along the road than you ever thought possible.

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While most entrepreneurs think that they’re “doing SEO”, not all of them are doing it well. Like most aspects of business, it’s not only important to be aware of Search Engine Optimization but to invest the time, effort and capital into doing it right. That means steering clear of mistakes that can see your online presence plummet in search engine rankings.

Mediocre content

While inactive pages are anathema for Google (and other search engines for that matter) it’s not enough to keep posting poor quality content. It’s important to remember that while you’re trying to appease search engine algorithms your first loyalty lies in appealing to your customer base. Your lucrative target market will be reading this content and expecting you to provide the quality of content that is consistent with the quality they’ve come to expect from your brand. After all, you don’t offer mediocre products or mediocre customer service, why would you offer mediocre content? When your core market fails to check your online presence, you can expect to see your content plummet in search engine rankings.

Lack of keywords

There’s a fine line to be found between creating engaging content and appeasing search engine algorithms. Even beautifully written and factually dense content can get outranked on search engines by inferior content if it doesn’t make good use of keywords. The key to success lies in harnessing the power of long tail keywords; specific groups to keywords to form phrases that are very specific to your field and your business.

Too many popups

Bloggers in particular tend to jump at the chance to monetize their content. After all, getting paid to write content is the dream to which many bloggers aspire. There’s a fine line, however, to be drawn between monetizing your site to an external advertiser and littering your site with popups. Popups can cheapen the appearance of your online presence and put customers off in their droves. This can cause your search engine rankings to drop. Operating on a “Pay As You Feel” principle may be a more effective way of monetizing your site.

Broken links

It’s a big part of SEO 101; make sure that your content is populated by both inbound and outbound links. This helps to legitimize the claims you make and drives internal traffic on your site. Proper links help you climb up the search engine rankings. That said, it’s important to check the quality of your links as broken links will do your rankings way more harm than good.