SEO is the wild west of marketing. The only rules are those set by search engines and they only tell you some of the rules some of the time and change them all of the time. There is no SEO Bachelor’s or Master’s or Doctorate Degree yet, and how could there be? By the time they wrote the book it would be obsolete.
Maybe that’s why every day a million sites at least make one of these common mistakes even though professionals in the field have been warning against them for nearly a decade. Here are some of the common mistakes that seem like good ideas, but can be disastrous in the long term.
1. Irrelevancy – So the obvious rule that most people know is not to have ‘cute puppies” as part of your SEO strategy if you do not sell cute puppies—no matter how popular cute puppies may be. A couple things happen; you tick off the people you tricked into visiting, and even if they want your stuff in the future they aren’t going to buy it from you now, and Google will penalize your site once they catch on. This goes for your online ads as well, though Google does not penalize for irrelevant ads, you customers will.