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6 Big Mistakes That SEO Rookies Make

Columnist John Lincoln has been in this business a long time -- and seen a lot of the same mistakes. Learn from the errors of other SEO newbies to start your career off on the right foot.

John Lincoln on January 19, 2016 at 12:32 pm

When you’re new to search engine optimization, you are going to make more mistakes than a seasoned pro. It is a complicated line of work, and you really cannot be good until you have significant experience.

Often, you won’t even know that you are making a mistake when you make it. There is just so much to know in the field and so much history.

I wrote this post to help out the undergrads of SEO. Here are the six biggest mistakes that I’ve noticed SEO newbies make and how to avoid them.

1. Not Knowing What They Don’t Know

Good SEO practitioners are aware of one undeniable truth: They are never finished learning.

You’ll find that any technical discipline requires constant education. That’s possibly truer of SEO than of other business operations.

Why? Because Google uses an algorithm to determine how pages get ranked, and you can’t count on that algorithm to stay the same.

Your SEO efforts that got you to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) in 2014 may be less effective in 2016. You also could find that your existing pages perform the dreaded “Google dance” — that is, they shift around in the SERPs because of algorithm changes.

What do you know about the latest Google algorithm change? If you can’t answer that, then that’s what you don’t know. Change that by keeping up with the changes, which are documented frequently.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

John Lincoln

John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, a digital marketing teacher at the University of California San Diego and author of the book Digital Influencer, A Guide to Achieving Influencer Status Online. Throughout his career, Lincoln has worked with hundreds of websites, ranging from start-ups to household names, and has won awards in SEO, CRO, analytics and Social Media. In the media, Lincoln has been featured on sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. Magazine, CIO magazine and more.