SEO is no longer the well-kept secret of high ranking websites. Everyone knows what SEO is, even if they don't necessarily know how to do it. Because so many people are trying to get on the first page of Google - and likely for exactly the same keywords that you're trying to rank for - you have to be doing everything right. Avoid making these 5 common SEO mistakes to up your game.

1. Using the Wrong Lingo

People in the kitchen industry, for example, would think that €kitchen electrics€ would be a common search term for kitchen appliances as that's what they're referred to within the industry. But that's not what they're referred to by customers. It's very unlikely that a customer would search in the same way that you'd think they would, so be intuitive.

2. Failing to Brainstorm

All too often we hear that people just use what they think to be the correct keywords, without bothering to actually spend some time brainstorming keywords. You don't have to spend loads of time doing customer research groups - it can literally be as simple as using Google Suggest, where you pop in the beginning of a keyword and then it autocompletes into a potential keyword. There's another option, Soovle, which autocompletes from all of the major search engines.

3. Being Too Safe

It's really important that you think outside the box. If you make baby furniture, for example, you don't just want to focus on baby furniture. Get people onto your site by thinking laterally. Do some brainstorming and have a real good think about different routes you could go down. In this example, you could have a page on your site talking about baby names, or a blog focussing on everything to do with becoming a parent for the first time. Don't be too safe as you might find that you lose out on a significant number of visitors.

4. Using the Wrong Type of WordPress

WordPress is one of the very best blogging platforms that you can use. But if you host it on WordPress, rather than on your own account, you might run into some problems when trying to personalise it. For example, you can't use AdSense on WordPress if hosted on WordPress. Although there are some fab plug-ins for SEO, it isn't really a flexible enough platform to properly do everything you'd want to do - instead, host it yourself, and you'll have full control over everything. And whatever you do, don't set up your blog as domainname.wordpress.com. It absolutely is not professional!

5. Not Disabling Depersonalisation

You'll always see skewed results in Google if the personalisation setting is on. Which won't give you an accurate representation of where you stand and where your competition stands. Logging out of Google isn't enough to get rid of those results. Go to settings, then onto web history, and then click on the option to disable personalised results based on your search activity.