High quality online content doesn't matter much without an equally smart strategy to present your words in front of target audiences.

If anyone suggest you, to ignore search-engine optimization (SEO) and focus on quality content. Remember, this is Worst advice anyone can give.

SEO still is igniting. The rules have changed and some of the starting lineup were on the lower level a few years ago, but you need a perfect strategy.

Let us take a look at few recent statistics:

·         93 percent of total online activities begin with a search engine

·         75 percent of users never get to the next page of search results

·         70 to 80 percent of users searching, ignore paid ads

Is SEO necessary? Yes, it is.                            

SEO simply "transforms" your website into language that's easily understood by search engines. So, users see your pages when they go hunting for products, offers, information, services, or answers to specific questions. HOW? The answer to your ‘how’ is SEO, and even a beginner’s guide can be helping.

It can be seen businesses making the same mistakes over and over again. Here are the three most frequent offenders:

1. Keywords.

Previously, keywords used to be important. But now content became the king. Many of us think that only quality of content is useful. This is not true to full extent even.

You still need keywords. Two mistakes that newbies and so called “experts” alike continue to make Stuffing keywords and targeting the wrong words. 

Stuffing aims to trick the engines by using an exact keyword phrase in an unnatural frequency.

Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to analyze your page's intent and determine keyword variations. Trust it. Use naturally occurring synonyms and alternatives instead of word-for-word iteration.

Have a keyword focus, but don’t force it. Include the keyword and its variations in the topic name, first paragraph, meta-data and throughout the body of the text.

Use the Keyword Planner to recognize words that come up in searches, but resist the automatic impulse to go after those with the highest search amount. Instead, find the relevant long back-end keywords (3-4-word phrases that make up the bulk of searches) with a decent amount. Use Trends to identify what’s popular and what so last year was.

2. Anchor text.

Anchor text –that are the clickable words in a hyperlink can prove disastrous to you.

You want your page links to point towards other content on your site as well as relevant material on external sites. The exact-match or keyword-rich anchor text are not any more fruitful for Businesses today.

Your best shot can be a healthy mix: 

·         Branded text, as in ”Mindstick is a good website”

·         Naked links, as in "www.mindstick.com"

·         Long tail links, as in "use a wide variety of anchor types to stay safe”

In my opinion, don’t rely on “anchor text” as your anchor text in a piece about anchor text.

Instead, try to develop a more natural anchor text distribution while doing your link building.

3. Image optimization.

We all like to see visuals, and they increase engagement of the users. Visually filled content gets more traffic, likes and shares.

But there's a problem: Search engines can’t catch images. Engines need textual descriptions to understand what the image represents and how it is relevant to your topic.

Include a highly relevant file name, alt-description (a detail of the image, as if you are telling a friend what the image depicts), caption, and image title. Some studies found captions are read near about 300 percent more than body text.

Consider any compression tool in the market such as PunyPNG or JPEGmini to reduce file size and load time, with very little loss of quality. Faster loading page means better SEO.

4. Link strategy.

Backlinks matters a lot. 90 percent of respondents use content promotion/ publication and guest posting as a part of their link-building paradigm. And 78 percent believe it's the most effective and important SEO-boosting strategy.

It's still a case of quality over quantity. You run the risk of Google's punishment if you include links from penalized/illegal sites or those with a domain authority less than 20. Populating with too many backlinks, frequently too, also could have negative effects.  

Guest-blogging with spams or link directories will penalize you. Instead, try to write high-quality content. Share it with influencers in your forte, and publish it on social media. Establish relationships with influential sites so you can pitch useful ideas that fit with their subjects and decide to offer real benefits to the readers. 

Surely, it will take longer. But three to four relevant, high-quality backlinks are definitely better than 100 of backlinks from objectionable sources. Commit yourself to play in the long run.

5. Fans and followers.

Social media is fantastic, but your number of fans is irrelevant.

It’s all about engagement, How are you communicating and interacting with people, and how are they connecting with you?

All the same, an active community of members who share your content and link back to your site can spread your brand awareness and authority. In turn, this increases your site traffic. Social activity signals to Google that people are interested in your site and spreading its message. 

Remember this mantra: It's not about numbers, it's about activity -- the actions you generate and the engagement your audience takes forward.

Mistakes are bound to happen. SEO is a complicated beast, after all. Avoiding these common pitfalls will help you play it smart and pay off in the long-term.