SEO Failures the can ruin your website’s ranking – Updated August 2020
Web optimization or Search Engine Optimization is an essential task for your site, as the fuel in your car.
But wait, while driving one needs to wear the safety belt or else it might expand your chances of getting smashed.
Similarly, while doing the SEO, you must be extremely careful when selecting the strategies or there will be consequences that may transform into a disaster.
It’s true that you may face dozens of issues when you want to touch the heights. You have to tackle all of them, which is seems, is easy only to say.
As we all know precaution is better than cure. So, you are always advised to do the work as per search engine guidelines.
Here are a few things which you need to avoid while performing SEO for your site.
Duplicate Content
Content is the pillar of digital marketing. To keep Google and visitors happy, you need genuine content for your site. This also helps you to attain the highest ranking on SERP.
It is not false to say that Google is in deep love with unique content. Therefore, if you serve it the duplicate content unique only in the name, it’ll break Google’s heart. Consequently, this may impact your search ranking.
If you focus on unique content, the success on the biggest search engine is guaranteed.
Duplicated contents, on the other hand, are one of the most important SEO failures.
You can check the content for plagiarism here: http://copyscape.com/
No Title Tag and Description
It is very hard to explain anything without the proper introduction. This principle also applies to search engines.
As we all know, these search engines use some kind of bots to crawl and understand your content. So, the meta title and description act as an introduction for your webpage to the crawlers.
If you want to know how to write a meta description for your website, you can read all the related information here: https://www.seoliquido.com/write-meta-descriptions-to-earn-higher-priority-in-serp/
A bot can understand the webpage by reading the title and description tags, so keeping meta description blank is a SEO failure and may put your site aside.
Broken URLs
A URL is said to be broken when it is returning a 404 error.
Broken links are very harmful to the websites because they turn users away. By being prevented to get the desired results from the site, the audience would probably not come back.
These links also increase the bounce rate of the website. Read about bounce rates here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en
The higher number of broken URLs means the lower ranking. So, you need to find out the broken or dead URLs of your site and to rectify them. Afterward, you can attract Google to enhance the ranking of your site.
Slow Loading Speed
If your website is taking too much time to load, then it may keep users away. Nowadays, everyone can access fast speed internet, meaning they want information with the speed of light.
If your website is lacking in the terms of speed, users will stop landing on your site, which will indicate Google to reduce the ranking of your site.
You need to find out the factors that slow it down and fix them as soon as possible.
It is an important factor that you need to pay special attention to. Otherwise, you will lose your ranking on SERP.
You can check the loading speed of your website on desktop and mobile, and can also find the factors which are making it slow. Visit: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Your site is not mobile-friendly
To get maximum traffic, make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices. Let’s be honest: How many times have you used PC to read through some articles recently? Well, if you are like most of the people, the answer to the question is probably a low number. Thus, to make your site mobile-friendly brings in benefits on two plans.
Readers want the site to be navigable. If they cannot easily get the information from the page, they would likely turn away. However, most of the search engines are aware of this. Therefore, started showing the results accordingly. If your page doesn’t support the range of formats, Google would not recommend you highly.
Spam Linking
First of all, you need to understand the backlink theory. A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one website to another.
Most of the digital marketing experts believe that the website more backlinks ranks higher on SERP. Yet, some people started creating fake or spam backlinks using some link building tools and techniques.
As Google has warned against link building, you should not participate in any link building scheme to prevent manual actions and penalties.
Nor readers nor search engines tolerate any kind of bias. Instead, focusing on the most relevant link is more productive than stuffing the page with a load of low-quality ones.
You can read about the Penguin algorithm created specifically for spam links: https://www.seoliquido.com/what-are-algorithmic-and-manual-penalties-of-google/
Using Hidden Text
Hidden texts are those written for crawl bots only. It is used to manipulate the bots to achieve higher rankings.
These texts can be hidden behind the image or on the background of the same text color.
A regular user can’t read these texts, but bots can. Using hidden text technique is highly prohibited in Google’s webmaster guidelines, which you can read here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
Optimizing for wrong keywords
To do SEO optimization well does require a bit deeper understanding of the tools and theory behind them. Therefore, inexperienced users may get trapped in the wrong choice of keywords, buy understanding a single portion of the technique.
One overall advice to help you avoid this mistake is to try to be specific. The more specific words are, and more relevant to the content, the quicker will be the results. You want organic, quality traffic, so make sure to optimize for the correct words.
Weak content
With a lot of talk on technicalities, one crucial aspect may be overseen. Content! Focusing on variety of techniques to stimulate the reach, we must not forget that the quality of the content should be our priority. Why? Because it is the final goal for both readers and Google! Only the highest quality content would rank respectively.
Not tracking the results
SEO offers you the chance to track the progress. Not only for the sake of success measurement, however. You should study and follow the rate your page achieves on separate parameters. When you interpret the results, you can focus on weaker points to make your page reach the top.
Here are a few things you need to be aware of while doing SEO of the website, so you never get into any trouble.