As search engines become smarter, following proper SEO practices is becoming more and more important. However, many people are still using outdated methods or making huge mistakes in their SEO strategy. We’ve put together a list of the Top 10 SEO Mistakes people are still making on their websites. If any of the points on this list ring true to you, get in touch with our team for a free, no obligation consultation on improving your online presence.
10. Ignoring Social Media
There are many studies which show a connection between social activity and a higher rank on Google. In general: pages with Google +1s, tweets, or Facebook likes tend to rank higher. It’s important to realise that this is a correlation and not necessarily causation. There is a fantastic website which shows strange correlations for example this one between US spending on science correlates very well with suicides.
So is the US budget for science, space and technology actively causing its citizens to take their own lives? This question is obviously far too silly to even consider, but it emphasizes the main point: correlation is not always causation.
So does social media affect your rank? Not directly, but the answer is yes. Social media makes your page visible to more people increasing the chance of it being featured in a journal, blog or another website. This generates links and mentions which will then directly affect your rank. Without social media your pages are just floating around unguided at the dark depths of the internet ocean hoping to be found.
9. Guest post spamming
The idea of writing guest posts is enough to excite most small business owners. You get to write content for a blog with more traffic, hopefully driving some of this traffic to your website and increasing your brand visibility. The problem is there are some people who like to abuse this and the search engines had to take action. Careful and considered well written guest posts on relevant websites to your industry will help you rank, but thousands of short, hastily written and irrelevant guest posts placed onto lots of different websites really won’t help you rank, and you are just wasting your time. It can also be tempting to submit the same post across many different websites, but this is duplicate content – more on that later.
8. Bad Backlinks or Backlink spamming
So what is a backlink? It’s basically a link which will send users who click it to your website. Google uses backlinks to decide how a site should rank, so they are certainly something that shouldn’t
be ignored. It can be difficult to guess if a website will be a good or bad backlink, but a lot of the time you can just use common sense. If a website uses a default WordPress theme, or contains lots of unrelated links to seemingly random websites, chances are it is not a good link. Eventually Google will find websites with bad backlinks and punish them. This results in your ranking getting penalized leading to your visibility dropping off a cliff. Cleaning up your backlinks is a service we offer, as well as many other digital agencies, and highly recommend if you have never done one before.
7. Poor User Experience
User experience is something that must be considered in all walks of life. Products, theme parks, roads, hotels and even doctors all need to ensure that their client is getting the best out of what they pay for. Your website is no exception and it’s important that you create it with user experience in mind. Not only will poor user experience drastically decrease the chance of anyone sharing your website (see social media), but search engines actually take into account your site’s user experience.
Think of Google as a human. Robotics are getting much more human like every year and we now well into 2015. It’s not unreasonable to assume that search engine bots are well advanced and not too far from eventually taking over the world in the robot revolution. While we are kidding about the robot revolution part there is an important take home message from this. Treat search engine bots as you would a user to your website. Their job is to ensure that the websites which are user friendly reach the top of their search engines, no one wants to click on a link and end up with a website so hideous they leave after 10 seconds.
Get your friends, family, employees and even your cat to all try your website. Get them to voice their concerns and act on them. Your website is designed to be used by humans, so design it for that.
6. Duplicate Content
Original and high quality content is the #1 priority when it comes to SEO. As anyone who has ever attended university can tell you, plagiarism is not a good thing. Google knows this and will punish those that duplicate content, even from your own website. It’s easy to copy other peoples blogs, or to copy an about section and slip your own name in there – but it’s not worth it. You’ll end up with a penalized website with a low ranking, a website which is competing against those that you stole the content from, and a website which has no unique selling point to the users. It might seem like a chore to go through the whole creation process for every single blog post, but it’s something that will reward you later down the line. Stealing good content from other people will never reward you and will eventually catch up to you.
There are also lesser known ways to creating duplicate content – some of which you may have accidentally done. Do a quick check to ensure that you don’t have more than one homepage, have printer-friendly pages, or more than one website with identical content (such as a mobile version). If you want us to help you with this then don’t hesitate to get in touch.
5. More than one website
Having more than one website for your business is rarely good. You’ll have to spend more money on development and advertising, you’ll have to spend more time for maintenance and promotion work, you’ll have two sets of data when it comes to web analytics, and duplicate content can become a serious issue. There are certain times when a second website is a good idea (for example – a landing page for an upcoming event or promotion) but it’s not a good idea to have two websites on a permanent basis.
Websites will become outdated. It’s a simple fact of life that fashion will change and one day (hopefully) shutter shades will once again fade into obscurity. Web design is basically the same concept and having more than one website only adds to the difficulty of keeping them both fresh and modern. You can’t just copy and paste the content as this is plagiarism (see above), and every few years you’ll need to do a complete redesign (such as for the new responsive trait that websites require). Aside from the time investment, you’ll also be paying for two sets of hosting, advertising campaigns, and your websites will also compete with each other.
It also undermines your brand identity. A strong brand is something which is very important to your business. If you want to buy an orange flavoured fizzy drink online are you going to search ‘Orange fizzy drink’ or ‘Fanta’? In order to avoid duplicate content you are going to need to create two brands, which means you can’t focus on only one. Without your sole focus your brand will suffer and will never be as strong as it could be. It’s also confusing for your users as they will notice similarities such as business address and the contact phone number. User experience can suffer when you run more than one website and we have already talked about how important user experience is.
4. Loading speed
Page speed is something which you can’t just ignore. Aside from linking in with user experience, it also has a direct impact on your search ranking. Although there is much debate throughout the SEO community as to what “site speed” actually means one thing is clear; a slow website has too many disadvantages to ignore. Your page speed isn’t exactly the most important ranking factor (content creation matters the most) but it’s still something you should consider, if not for user experience alone. You can test your page speed for free using Google PageSpeed.
3. Ignoring your blog
Having a blog is like having a dog. You can’t just ignore it and expect it to be okay. Your blog is a place for you to create fresh, well thought out,
exciting content and this is important for many reasons. One of the main advantages of this is the social media aspect of it – You’ll be able to become a known content guru and people will start to recognize your brand as an expert in that field. This will help increase your ranking on search engines for terms other than just your business name. A blog is also a fantastic way to generate backlinks to your website – something which will also help your SEO team.
Having fresh content will also get visitors back to your website for a second viewing. This not only increases the chance that they will use your service or buy your product, but it also helps build bridges with potential clients. Perhaps they would like you to write some content for their blog as a guest? Or maybe they loved your blog writing skills so much that they want to pay you to write their content for them. There are many businesses that offer blog writing services (us included!) so if you are too busy to write your blog you can often outsource it, much like a dog really.
2. Improper Redirections
It is vital to make sure that your site has proper redirections in place. Make sure that you have chosen to use either the http://www or just http:// protocol and stick to it. Redirect the one you’re not using to your preferred version by adding a 301 permanent redirect in your .htaccess file. You can find out how to do this in this http redirection guide.
If your site is using SSL, make sure to redirect the non-SSL domain to the SSL domain to ensure all of your visitors are seeing the secure version of your website.
1. Not optimising your website for search engines
Your website will be visited by a robot at some point in its life, not physically of course. This robot is known as a crawler or spider and it’s going to rate your website on many different factors (see the nine above). While it’s very important that your website looks good and makes people want to use your service or buy your product, it’s also just as important that your website looks good to a crawler, or no one will be able to find it.
Most of your cold lead traffic will find you using search engines just like Google, so you need to ensure that your website is built from the ground up with this in mind. That’s why you should always consider a developer who has ties with an SEO team, so that you can get the best from both worlds. SEO is a costly business but it’s always worth it when it’s done correctly. The return on investment takes a while to pay off but a good SEO campaign will bring in far more money than it costs to run – but you can only start a campaign if your website is ready for it.
If your website was built without thinking about your SEO, you are going to have to shell out a lot of money to fix it first. Money which you could have saved if you had considered SEO during the build phase of your website.