Guide to SEO mistakes you should no longer be making in 2019

The aim of this article is to provide you with a guide to the SEO mistakes you should no longer be making in 2019.
By now, everyone is convinced: organic search is essential when you have an online presence. The use of SEO is growing, yet relatively few people are genuinely familiar with SEO best practices.

Understanding SEO in a few lines

We offer a very brief definition of SEO, to help you grasp this very particular web discipline.
SEO is a set of techniques whose aim is to increase the ranking of a website in search engine results. These techniques attract more potential visitors to the website by relying on a keyword logic.
There is a set of best practices that we will cover in other dedicated SEO articles.
Here, we will develop an SEO mistake guide covering the most common errors.

SEO guide: the most common mistakes

Having incorrectly configured your WordPress

In first position in this SEO mistake guide: poor configuration. An increasing number of organisations use WordPress.

Used correctly, this CMS can work genuine wonders from an SEO perspective. However, if you have misconfigured your WordPress site, you will have no organic visitors.
Go to the Settings > Reading tab and tick the box "Ask search engines not to index this site" — making sure it is unchecked if you want to be indexed.

In 2017, 26% of websites published on WordPress forgot this essential step.

Forgetting meta tags

All meta tags help Google's bots understand your website and the entirety of your pages' content. The position of meta tags in your code is essential.

If you use WordPress to manage your association's website, we recommend using Yoast to manage your SEO.
If you outsource the management of your association's website, we recommend checking the position of meta tags via plugins available on Chrome or Firefox (such as Meta SEO Inspector for Chrome or SEO Inspector for Mozilla Firefox).

Publishing poor-quality text content

Let us not forget that text content is what Google understands and interprets best. Therefore, if your text is of very poor quality, or if you have duplicated content from another page, the impact on your site's SEO will be absolutely dismal.

Choosing the wrong keywords

You think you know everything about your organisation and the world around it? We can assure you otherwise. You are not inside your visitors' heads. As a result, you may not have opted for the right keywords to attract as many people as possible to your website.
Working on the right keywords is essential.

Not aiming for first place

If you have defined good keywords, the main mistake is failing to develop a strategy that will allow you to target first place. Moreover, SEO is a long-term discipline. Do not give up before you have reached that top position.

Thinking you are well ranked

Yes, indeed! Here is something you may not have expected! You are in the habit of using one single browser. When you enter your query in that browser, Google takes your search history into account. The display of your website within search results will therefore be skewed.
If you habitually use Google Chrome to browse the web, we recommend checking your rankings using Firefox.

This guide to the most common SEO mistakes is by no means exhaustive. Nevertheless, we invite you to compare these key points against the reality of your own website.