Semalt Warns Of 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes That Could Cause Considerable Damage To Your Website
So in the field of SEO in particular, you must always be up to date. Outdated SEO practices, actions that violate Google's guidelines or black hat techniques can quickly lead to manual or algorithmic penalties, which can have dramatic consequences on a company's online presence and result in a significant drop in visitors.
This article will give you an overview of the 7 most common SEO mistakes you should avoid when optimizing your website for search engines.
SEO mistake №1: Unnatural links
Link building has become a minefield. Unnatural link building can result in algorithmic or manual penalties that can lead to the loss of individual rankings or even the complete de-indexing of a website in search engines. "Unnatural link building" means that artificial links are set up on a website using various techniques to increase search engine rankings.
This includes excessive link exchange, reciprocal links, link wheels, use of over-optimized link text, link purchases, automated link building through software and many others. Google has launched its own FAQ page to sharpen webmasters' understanding of artificial link schemes.
Links are still one of the most important ranking factors on Google. This was only recently confirmed by John Mueller, a Web Trend Analyst at Google. Google's Matt Cutts once referred to links as the company's "online reputation." This refers to the quality of recommendations that are made to search engines in the form of links, among other things. A company needs to pay close attention to the websites and businesses it is linked to. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas". So it's worth thinking carefully about the methods you use when building external links for your own website.
In recent years, Google has released various algorithm updates designed to ensure that unnatural link building can be considered spam and result in a significant deterioration in the ranking of websites that violate this guideline. Most notably, this includes the Penguin update, which pays attention to a wide variety of metrics in the area of off-page optimization and aims to limit unnatural link building.
However, there are still companies that want to benefit immediately from external links to their rankings and, on this basis, resort to methods that violate Google's guidelines.
Here are some mistakes that cause damage in the field of link building
The following typical errors, which cause the most damage in the link building field, can be a trigger for the Penguin update:
- Over-optimized link texts: The website's link profile has a disproportionately high proportion of links with exact link texts. For example, the term "hair straightener" is always linked to a subpage of an online store that is supposed to rank with the term "hair straightener" on Google.
- Choosing quantity over quality of links: A high number of poor quality backlinks can do more damage to a website than you think. As a rule, they are worthless, as they do not offer any added value for the user and do not significantly improve the ranking. They only lead to Google penalties, which can significantly worsen the organic visibility of a domain.
- Deep link ratio: backlinks should not only be placed on the homepage. The deep link ratio (ratio between links to the homepage and links to deeper pages) must be adjusted to the usual ratio in the industry in order to look natural. Links to lower pages can significantly improve their ranking. Search engines consider the link profile as a whole. Links to internal pages can also improve the ranking of the home page, for example by increasing metrics such as domain popularity or domain authority.
SEO mistake №2: keyword stuffing
Keywords are not completely "dead." Keywords can still be used very well to develop content ideas and create pages on topics of interest. The user searches for topics and questions and communicates this to the search engine by entering keywords. The search engine is now able to understand the search intent of a user when he enters a certain keyword. So what we can forget is that the frequency of keywords has some relevance.
Keyword stuffing means that a certain keyword is used over and over again in the content - to improve the page's ranking for that keyword through this measure.
What you need to know is that keyword count is only a small factor in Google's algorithm. No one knows exactly how high the percentage is, but there are certainly more important factors such as user experience, domain authority or high-quality links that play a bigger role.
Google wants to satisfy the user and provide a good experience using the search engine, the results it provides and the websites visited. If all the articles proposed for a search term are "stuffed" with keywords, nobody would use Google as a search engine anymore because the user experience when reading these texts is not good. Google will therefore not offer such results to the user, or even penalize the concerned site.
Another important factor is added: no one would link to such content - at least no one with a high level of authority. And because links are so much more important than keyword frequency, it would be fatal to offer such texts.
Here are some important recommendations to solve this problem
Avoid keyword placement when writing texts for the Web. Instead, texts should be written in such a way that they offer real added value to the user, answer important questions about a topic and are generally of absolutely high quality. This also includes correct punctuation, no spelling or grammatical errors, structuring the texts, e.g. the use of lists or tables (where appropriate), and supplementing the content with images and video material.
Of course, it always makes sense to include keywords in important places (e.g. in headings). However, this should be done automatically when writing the texts. If I can't put the important search term in the content itself and in a few headings, then I may have missed the point.
Ideally, the content is so good that it receives natural links and social signals, which in turn generates better search engine rankings. The chance of building authority with such content is considerably higher.
Another important point to emphasize in this regard is that you should not choose keywords simply by inspiration. So, you should do it with the help of a keyword generator tool such as the Dedicated SEO Dashboard. Indeed, the Dedicated SEO Dashboard is a latest-generation tool that has several features that can help you increase your website's visibility considerably. One of these features is the Google SERP Analysis. With this feature, you can easily know the keywords that you can use to better optimize your content. Moreover, this feature reveals your main competitors and the keywords they use to get more traffic. With this DSD feature, you won't need to do keyword stuffing to get traffic.
SEO mistake №3: Thin and duplicate content
Keyword stuffing is not the only measure you can get in trouble with Google & Co. High-quality content is more in demand today than ever and has been positively promoted for years. Anyone who doesn't satisfy the user with their search won't get good rankings.
Thin content
If a website consistently produces "bad" or thin content, it can permanently damage the website's reputation. Not only in the search engines, but also with the users who read this content. Bad content means, for example, content that is extremely short, not very descriptive, unnecessary, too general or poorly researched. With the term "light content", the Search Marketer is usually referring to content that does not offer the user any added value. These can now be recognized much faster than they were a few years ago. Google defines "lightweight content" as content that offers little or no added value to the user.
Duplicate Content
Most website owners know that duplicate content can not only lead to a drop in rankings, but also result in a penalty. But even today, many are not sure what duplicate content really is and how DC issues can be circumvented or resolved.
Different URLs showing the same content is bad. Google's Duplicate Content Guidelines already provide insight into best practices for managing pages with similar or identical content. Nonetheless, incorrectly managing duplicate content is one of the most common mistakes we, as an SEO agency, see in practice. Webmasters often forget to include the necessary tags in the source code. This is especially true for relaunches and website migrations. So, to solve this problem, you need to have the appropriate software to check the uniqueness of each content of your site. If you have worked with the Dedicated SEO Dashboard this problem will be easily solved in one click. Because it has a very advanced feature for checking the uniqueness of content.
SEO Mistake №4: Website Re-launch Failure
A relaunch or redesign is a demanding undertaking, in which important SEO requirements should not be overlooked under any circumstances. Sitemaps and internal links need to be updated, 301 redirects from old URLs set to new URLs or metadata updated. The list of necessary measures is long and would fill a blog post on its own.
Overall, it's important: if the necessary steps and measures are not followed or not executed correctly, there is a risk of massive loss of organic visibility and traffic.
To summarize, here are the 10 most common website relaunch mistakes that are commonly seen:
- Missing redirects despite changes to the URL structure.
- Internal links are not updated.
- Robots.txt is blocking the crawler.
- The robots meta tag contains the value "noindex".
- The images have not been moved or are still under a different URL structure that is not accessible after the relaunch.
- Analytics code has not been installed on the new website.
- There are still unnecessary resources (e.g. JS and CSS) in the source code that were only needed in the test version.
- The old OnPage optimization has not been carried over to the new website.
- External links still point to the old URL structure.
- It has not been sufficiently tested and monitored after the relaunch. In the worst case, you will only notice the errors after a complete loss of ranking.
Has the website migration already gone wrong? The mentioned mistakes can have medium and long term consequences on the organic traffic of the site. Especially if you are not prepared to correct these errors after the relaunch and follow good SEO practices. Once you have fixed all the problems, it is quite possible to return to the previous level, even if the traffic is already in free fall for a few weeks.
SEO Mistake №5: Not optimizing for local search
Another SEO mistake we see more often is missing or incorrect optimization for local search. This is especially relevant for businesses that have a local or regional focus.
According to Search Engine Watch, more than 50% of mobile searches are aimed at finding local results and more than 60% of those searches result in a transaction. Good rankings in local search have a direct impact on store traffic, as 50% of consumers who have performed a local search query on their smartphone stop by a store within a day. In the desktop and tablet segment, this still affects 34% of consumers. So if you're not optimizing for local search, you're missing out on a ton of potential customers. You then need to be clear on the steps you're already taking for local searches.
SEO mistake №6: long loading times
Page load speed is a major factor in how quickly users get a web page and is very relevant to website optimization. While there are now many articles on the web that show how important website load time is to the user experience, studies show that a surprising number of pages still don't perform well in this regard. A study by Portent, which analyzed 16 million page views on 16 e-commerce websites, shows that 50% of pages took more than 5 seconds to load. On average, users jump at a load time of more than 3 seconds, which is why high load times have a negative effect not only on e-commerce websites, but also on websites in general.
To solve this problem, it is important to do a thorough audit to know all the problems related to the slow site. Once again, you can rely on the Dedicated SEO Dashboard for a thorough audit of your site. Not only will it allow you to do a thorough audit with just one click, but it will also give you the guidelines to solve each problem that the audit reveals.
SEO Mistake №7: Lack of tracking and monitoring of website performance
Regular analysis of your own website's performance is a critical point, regardless of whether SEO and online marketing activities have been outsourced or whether your own internal marketing exists. It is not enough here to occasionally log into Google Analytics and see how many users have accessed your own website in the last few days. Continuous work in the field of web analytics is essential to be able to evaluate the measures and decisions taken in online marketing.
In the context of this blog post, however, it should be about typical SEO errors in tracking and monitoring. In addition to Google Analytics, Google offers Google Search Console, an important tool for regularly monitoring errors and issues. Among other things, Google uses Search Console to report website penalties to the webmaster. Therefore, a regular review of the Search Console is essential.
Conclusion
SEO mistakes can have dramatic consequences on the performance of a website. The world of online marketing and SEO changes regularly, so it's necessary to stay current and work on the website regularly. Techniques that worked months ago can no longer meet the quality guidelines of search engines. So, you should always keep an eye on your website to avoid bad surprises.