5 SEO Mistakes That Will Harm Your Website Rankings

SEO is an important as well as a critical part of today’s efforts of marketing. Yet, many online marketers and sellers miss this mark. This is mostly because there is so much information out there and a lot is outdated. Google is bottom line the leader, if you are looking to determine few of the best SEO practices. Changes are occurring all the time, to make sure that only the best of the best of content reaches at the top of SERPs. Tactics and SEO strategies that used to work once, are known to be outdated that can also penalize your site.

Certain SEO mistakes are lesser serious as they may be just a case of poor optimization. They might not be necessarily an outdated strategy. Here are a few mistakes that you need to take care of, while optimizing your website for better rankings on the SERP.

1.) Poor Design Of Your Website:

This is one of the foremost and basic mistakes in SEO. You don’t want to have a bad website design with a poor navigation. But it is not too tough to settle this by correcting it with some simple guidelines. Poorly designed website is not penalized directly. Your website should be user friendly. A user friendly website is SEO centric and one of the primary factors of achieving good SEO results. It should be clear, easy to read fonts, easy and clear navigation, strike a balance between too high contrast and too low contrast.

Your website should be responsive which means it should run on mobile, laptops, tablets and desktops alike with the right resolution. If your website is responsive, then chances are that Google will prioritize your website over others. Avoid using any kind of flash or iframes. Try not to use flash, as Apple is known to block Flash on most devices.

2.) Duplicate Content:

Beware of having duplicate content on different pages of your website. You could include similar content on different pages of your website. Avoid using duplicate and plagiarized content anywhere in your website. Or else you will be penalized big time by Google, beyond belief and it’s quite certain that you will lose rankings. Your website maybe blacklisted as well. Using premium plagiarism software to check for plagiarized content is a good step towards implementing a clean and effective content for your website.

Copyscape is such a tool that will help you check for duplicate content and remove duplicate content from your website if you have any. Having fresh content for your website is always a good and the right idea. If you have duplicate content in your website by chance, then you will suffer penalty. Your content should be original and trustworthy. Other SEO strategies to avoid duplicate content include using canonical links and no index robots Meta tag.

3.) Keyword Stuffing:

Keyword stuffing as well as over-optimizing is quite harmful for your website. Stop stuffing keywords in your web pages. Overuse of keywords throughout your content, will get your site penalized. Early in the 2000, this tactic used to work well, and was known to be one of the best SEO strategies that led to rankings. Although this technique does not exist anymore, still many SEOs feel it is effective. But according to new Google algorithm, this is also known as keyword stuffing and is not a good SEO practice. Keyword stuffed content is hard to read as the main focus is on keywords and not the whole picture or the total concept that complicates the meaning of the content on your website and gives lesser value to your search thus receiving penalty Google penalty.

Try not to focus on a certain keyword, but using phrases and alike. Latent semantic indexing is a good procedure that can be implemented on your website and can do wonders for your website on Google SERPs. Through latent semantic indexing you can include keywords that are synonyms related to the title of the page. If the page was classic cars, then the search engine would expect to find words relating to the subject or the topic pointing to the content of that page including keywords such as collectors, automobile, Bentley, Austin and car auction.

4.) Hidden Text:

Can you actually rank for a whole bunch of keywords without letting your readers about it or annoying them. That’s what the concept of hidden text in SEO states. It worked for a while, but only for black hat SEOs. Now in this era, using hidden text is nothing but total black hat SEO. There is nothing much you can accomplish with hidden text as search engines will penalize you for doing that. Text could be hidden by using the same color as background. This hides it from most of the human readers. But this is not feasible for search engine crawlers.

SEO used to be such where, readers were shown the normal readable content, but the bots had to deal with spammy, keyword stuffed optimization. Hidden text is an absolute no-no in today’s world of SEO. Yes guys, Google hates it and you better know it well. It views it as a black hat SEO practice that will present search engines with certain text and the bots or the search engines with something else. Google will also penalize you for using this strategy. If you think, you can use this particular technique to rank on the SERPs or deceive the search engines, and then you are wrong. Be aware of the fact that, hidden text does not work anymore and is a black hat SEO practice.

5.) Bad Title Pages:

The page title is that text that appears on the browser tab and the bookmarks of the user. You might not be fully aware of proper implementation of page titles and may end up using bad page titles. You will end cramming up with keywords with opposite route and instead making it “Welcome to our site”. There might be worse – something that is equally uninformative. Page titles are one of the most important ranking factors in SEO. You must make sure that you use them correctly.  Page titles will be short, informative and must contain relevant keywords that are related to the content of the page or the product page.

Primary keywords must appear first on the title tag and then the secondary keywords and finally the business name. Here is an examples – “Swimwear – Swimwear Trunks on Sale” and finally include the business name. Title tags should be unique for every page and should be used in an appropriate way on your site. Page titles are used for default names for desktop shortcuts and bookmarks. Thus a good title for every single page is a must for good SEO results and proper optimization. A visitor will most likely return to the bookmarked page, if they can tell what it actually is at a glance at your bookmarks menu. Break the old SEO habits and that is the first and foremost priority.