Common Mistakes that Hurt Your SEO

Table of Contents

Whether you own a small business or a mature brand, a website is a critical component of your business that needs to run like a well-oiled machine. However, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that your website’s ability to generate quality leads is the cornerstone of your online presence. Many times webmasters get carried away with other important yet distracting aspects of their website such as graphic design and presentation. If you want your website to outperform your competition and survive the next Google algorithm update apocalypse, be certain that you don’t make the following mistakes that can really hurt your SEO (search engine optimization).

Keyword Spamming

Erroneously, some people feel that the best way to improve their organic search rankings is to cram their keywords into a piece of content as many times as possible. This produces a rough piece of writing that doesn’t flow well. In turn, a human reader will likely not find it very useful.

Some web masters have had the idea that it doesn’t matter if a human doesn’t like the content. After all, it was actually written for the Google search algorithm to increase organic rankings, right? WRONG! You will definitely attract the attention of Google, only you will lose rankings instead of gaining them. The algorithm is fine tuned to recognize keyword spamming and rank low quality content accordingly.

It’s simply not worth it. Use good judgment and don’t spam keywords!

Redundant Page Titles

If multiple page titles on your site are exactly the same (or extremely similar) it may make it harder for a visitor to your site to find the content they are looking for. This won’t do your bounce rate any favors, but it also harms your SEO potential. Search engines index pages by using a mechanism called a crawler. The crawler goes through each page with a fine tooth comb and uses a complex algorithm to determine a page’s ranking and legitimacy. If all of your page titles are the same, you have not only missed an opportunity to enhance SEO by using relevant keywords, but you also risk causing the crawler to incorrectly index your pages.

NOTE: Learn a LOT about SEO and marketing your website online in Red Canoe Elite

Link Schemes

There are an endless supply of linking schemes out there.  Trust me, the only real link building campaign you need is content marketing.  Write great stuff that people want to share. The links will come.

Don't fall for things like this
Don’t fall for things like this

Low Quality, UnNatural or Broken Backlinks

Each backlink to your site could be considered an endorsement from another web page that affects your search engine ranking signals in the Google algorithm. Unfortunately, not every backlink helps your website rank higher. In fact, some can actually harm your rankings.

To better illustrate this point, let’s draw an analogy to a television ad produced by a popular sports drink brand. In the commercial, they choose a famous athlete to endorse their product, thereby enhancing their brand and their image. If they instead choose to have a sketchy criminal endorse their brand, do you think their sales would increase?

Not a chance!

Likewise, backlinks from high quality, reputable websites endorse your website. But if you have backlinks from spammy, shady websites, the Google algorithm will cause your rankings to plummet. If low quality websites have linked to you without your consent, this is one time when we recommend hiring a professional to help you clean it up.  You can use the Google disavow tool to disassociate yourself from a spammy site, however you can also really hurt your website if you don’t do it correctly.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts