Relying on  SEO techniques that are obsolete can do harm instead of taking your website up to the top rankings. You might not come to know about your mistakes unless you observe that the page ranking status of your website has changed drastically which might lead to going down the ranking. So, how to prevent making any mistake when using SEO techniques? Here are some techniques that can lead to your SEO pitfall unless you rectify them.

1. Adding Keywords to Anchors – The practice of adding keywords to anchor texts  is no longer accepted by search engines, as Google terms this as a link scheme. Your ranking may go down if this is the case. Instead, you can either leave your URL without adding anything or you can just add the name of your company.
2. Below Par Guest Posts – Use guest posts that meet the required quality standards instead of just buying contents that are below par in quality. Create an absorbing and relevant content after deciding on the concept and ensure that it is free of spelling and grammatical errors. You can have your content pass a quality control check for assessing the standards and verify that the images do not draw any penalty relating to royalty.
3. Keyword Stuffing – It does not necessarily mean that the more the keywords the better are the chances of optimizing. In fact, it is just the reverse, because if the search engines finds stuffing of keywords instead of a quality content, the content will not be optimized. Stick to a recommended percentage of keywords and avoid using irrelevant keywords, background full of keywords and images having hidden text. Instead, use the keywords in the content as it comes naturally so that readers find it interesting and are forced to go through the entire content.
4. Duplicate Content – Using duplicate content can be the worst mistake in SEO. When search engines find any duplicate content, the content will be left without being crawled. This is because no two duplicate contents published can be differentiated to determine which one is original. The general sources of duplicate contents include product descriptions by manufacturers, overuse of comments or quotes which are already published on other websites, URLs that direct you to the pages that are identical and syndicated content. You can use tools like Copyscape to find out whether your content is duplicate, and if it is so, you should immediately make a change. Create a unique content and replace the existing one.

While focusing on SEO strategies that could work for a long time and avoiding these mistakes, you can help your website to move up the ranks instead of falling victim to the SEO pitfalls.