SEO is an inviting space open to great possibilities if only people would reach out and seize it! When prompted, SEO experts are happy to share their experiences and recent strategies for the usage of search engine optimization. With the guidance of our SEO experts, our websites are sure to climb to the top recommendations for Google searches.
Social media is that facilitator enabling access to these SEO titans and gems.
Those in the SEO industry can help any individual, beginner or expert, gain the foresight to find success with their websites. Whether blogging or selling products, every website is impacted by keyword research, search engine optimization, link building, and modern approaches to SEO strategy.
With that said, to help you on your search engine optimization journey, experts provide their deep technical SEO experience and share their experiences of common mistakes beginners tend to make when it comes to SEO. Other's experiences are powerful when taken into account and applied can propel you to victory. SEO beginners who follow these words of wisdom will find themselves profoundly understanding SEO and how best to strategically apply it to find success.
Why They Classify as SEO Experts
Every individual listed has a solid background of success. Many run their own successful operations and agencies, others have seen rapid and consistent growth with their websites in a short period of months and sustain their viewership long-term. All have made substantial contributions in the world of technical SEO by actively providing high-quality content focusing on SEO insights to online communities.
Note how our deemed experts have different accomplishments and backgrounds. This enables a well-rounded impression of how SEO consideration is uniform in any discipline and business!
Expert Insights on the Biggest Mistakes Beginners make with SEO
The Failure to Establish Oneself as a Domain Expert
The whole point of providing content is to answer a question your reader has been asking. Common sense says that a person asking a question is inclined to listen to those who prove their ability to provide a sufficient answer. This leads to the importance of topical authority or the measure of authority built up through proven expertise and trust in your field. Abundance of high-quality, informative content proves your website is a trusted source for information on a particular topic.
This leads to the firstmost piece of wisdom from our SEO experts.
Topical authority solves so many other issues and allows for so many more valuable optimizations like internal linking, content quality/depth, and brand building. Go deep. Go wide. And keep asking yourself how you can super-serve your audience.
- Paul Lemley owner of 18 successful niche websites
Proving expertise naturally takes time, consistency, and, as a result, patience, and perseverance. If your readers begin to see you as a knowledgable go-to source, then naturally the search engines will follow.
Unfortunately, we are subject to a culture of impatience and instant gratification which instills in us the expectation of quick results. Otherwise, we turn to assume our efforts are in vain.
This leads to the next advice our SEO experts encourage newcomers to search engine optimization to follow.
Avoid the Expectation of Immediate Results (All or Nothing Mentality)
The common advice these SEO experts provide revolves around patience and persistence. We live in a fast-paced society which has caused us to grow accustomed to quick results.
Starting with your own page and making it the best resource on the web is a great way to learn about UX, writing, and human psychology.
-Dan owner of saintvienna.com
When SEO newcomers do not see rapid progress, they tend to assume that what they are trying is not working. Beginners oftentimes try to tackle all areas they find out about for SEO and have expectations for it to immediately convert into strong results. In reality, there are common optimizations we should focus most of our efforts towards.
Three of the most important activities are:
1. Keyword research
2. Content inspection
3. Publishing
Doing these 3 properly will definitely result in website growth. The rest can be worked on when you get to 50k–100k visits monthly.
- Denis runs niche sites up to 100k/month ($0-$4000 niche site in 4 months)
SEO beginners tend to fall victim to analysis paralysis.
Analysis Paralysis depicts the inability to make decisions as a result of over-thinking. Too much data can cause more harm than good and can cripple our progress when it comes to SEO.
One such expert has noticed this trend and suggests instead of fixating on the data, focus efforts on creating great content and spreading the word!
The biggest mistake people make when it comes to SEO is "analysis paralysis".
However, instead of checking your rankings for 30 minutes every morning for vanity, do outreach for links or get some more content created!
- Jeremy Rivera owner of seoarcade.com, SEO adviser and owner of several niche sites monetized by affiliate commissions and display ads
Beginners Mistakenly Prioritize Content Quantity over Content Quality
The next common trend our SEO experts have identified among beginners focuses on optimizing details besides what should be the most obvious one: the quality of the content!
Website owners churn out a lot of content of lower tier or average quality, sacrificing quality for quantity.
SEO folks love talking about everything but quality…WRITE GREAT CONTENT and the rest usually takes care of itself.
- Mike of nichetwins.com (has 750k pageviews and 40k a month)
Focus on the Easy SEO basics that Make For Quick Wins
Proper use of metatags, header tags and optimizing the page title is so simple, yet I still see a lot of websites that have the "home" on them and not a single keyword in site. Also, people don't get heading tags right.
They use multiple H1 tags and don't optimize them. People use the H1 - H6 mostly for CSS styling and not for SEO impact.
- Roberto Robles owner of katlinks.io and superseo.tips
Beginners are so caught up with the plethora of different focus points for SEO that they tend to forget the basics! Roberto wants to first bring us to grasping the fundamentals before expanding to specificity.
Internal linking is yet another easier way to optimize for search engines. The majority of SEO beginners try to attain backlinks or focus on external linking - so much so that they forget to give credit toward their own content in effective ways!
Avoid using generic anchors like "click here" because it tells search engine bots nothing about what the target page is about. Besides anchor text, the other crucial factor when it comes to internal links is to make sure the two pages are relevant to each other.
Don't link just to get more links to pages, but make sure the pages are topically relevant. That will help to build topical authority for the linked pages and your site overall.
- Yoyaoh Hsueh provides SEO topics and owns niche websites. He has a portfolio of niche sites monetized by affiliate commissions and display ads. He runs a niche site focused weekly newsletter known as Niche Surfer nichesurfer.com
However, once we get the basics down, we can get to the fun parts of SEO and dive into keywords to optimize for keyword rank.
Keyword research is a primary way to determine what people are actively searching for and guides content marketing planning to enable an increase in organic search visibility, rankings, and traffic.
One expert mentions keyword research importance, which often results in a primary keyword being targeted for content creation. Our SEO expert highlights the importance of secondary keywords in addition to those primary keywords.
- Stephen Hockman is an entrepreneur and founder of SEO Chatter. He specializes in search engine optimization and digital marketing. His passion is to help others master SEO so they can get higher rankings and more targeted traffic to their websites. Stephen has been doing SEO and building niche websites and affiliate sites since 2005.
Having a list of multiple relevant keywords is vital to ranking, however, we need to strike a delicate balance to have the right variance of keywords. We can overdo it with keywords, by providing the same set in too many articles. This results in triggering keyword cannibalization which involves too many identical keywords spread throughout the content on your website.
- JayhustlerSEO is an SEO & Marketing Engineer who has helped over 107 brands and businesses in improving their website's visibility through SEO.
Finally, don't sacrifice keyword usage over readability. Always consider the user first. Ensure your content is optimized first for the readers, then the search bots.
My main advice is always to focus in the users, not the bots. You don't have to put a keyword in your H2 if you have a better way to communicate.
- Marcos Do Canto founder of Magic Write
Naturally, over time the way our search engines digest our content will evolve.
It is vital we avoid quick-win-type solutions for SEO and prioritize quality content. Quality will persevere over any adjustment that will inevitably be thrown our way in the future.Summary
SEO beginners tend to error with:
- Topical Authority
- Patience
- Consistency
- Content Quality
- Data Overthinking
- Basics (like headers, metatags, and inner linking)
- Keyword Research (primary and secondary)
- Avoidance of Keyword Cannibalization
Thanks for reading and for your support, I wish you the best in your SEO adventures!
Remember, developers are creatures that turn coffee into code. So I'd very much appreciate if you bought me a coffee! 
I’m a new writer and I will be posting very frequently on my findings and learnings in the tech industry and beyond. Join my newsletter if you would like to stay tuned!
Thanks for reading again! ❤️
| Understand Open Graph Dynamic Image Meta Tags | 1 |
| Pros and Cons of Caching Data in Software | 2 |
| How to build a Modal in ReactJS (Part One) | 3 |