Jul 13, 2018

6 Costly Mistakes That Will Hurt Your Site’s Search Engine Ranking

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SEO is quite critical to the success of a website, and of course, neglecting it for whatever reason is a costly mistake that will hurt the search engine ranking of a website. Lots of webmasters and site owners spend tons of money on perfecting various SEO strategies to finally attain the Eldorado of web venture — which is unlimited traffic. There is, however, no guarantee that any of the SEO strategies used will have positive outcomes, particularly if certain erroneous steps are taken.

If you want your website or blog to stand a chance of achieving its SEO goals, then there are certain mistakes that you must avoid otherwise you risk hurting your site’s search engine ranking and ruining your chances of boosting the traffic that it generates.

The 6 mistakes discussed in this article are the most obvious among the numerous erroneous steps that hurt a site’s search engine ranking.

Using Duplicate Content or Content that isn’t 100% Original

Apart from the fact that using duplicate content on your website ruins the experience of the prospective readers, it is also an SEO offense that is guaranteed to be penalized by search engines.

Since the release of the Penguin 2.0 rule manual by the internet’s biggest search engine platform, Google, its algorithm has been effectively set to target and penalize sites that make use of duplicate content that is already in use on another website.

There is simply no reason for you to lazily copy articles and write-ups that belong to other websites and blogs and portray them as yours. If you do not possess the expertise to craft decent content for your web platform, then you should consider hiring a writing expert who works as a freelancer.

Stuffing Keywords to Achieve Search Engine Ranking

It is a relief that Google has taken a stand against the irritating habit of stuffing keywords in the texts of an article, all in the name of SEO. Not too long ago, it wasn’t unusual to see the first page of the search engine’s result pages filled with sites that simply stuffed numerous keywords together without focusing on the quality of the content being used.

Most of the articles in these sites are basically incoherent ramblings that have been padded with several potent keywords all for the sake of achieving respectful search engine rankings.

This is, however, not the case anymore, as Google has been able to see through such an act of deception and aptly penalizes any site that chooses to engage in this malpractice.

To be in the good books of Google with regards to the placement of keywords, you must find the right balance between SEO and content clarity. In fact, the clarity and relevance of your content hold more weight than whatever keyword integration you intend to implement.

Buying Links

Link building is a regular SEO practice that has been proven to function effectively and leads to a much-improved search engine ranking. There are, however, two ways this practice can be carried out, which are the white-hat method and the black-hat method.

The white-hat link building method principally involves the use of guest posts to gain back-links to a website. This is a natural method of placing links that search engine giant, Google, has no problem with. The black-hat link building method, however, involves purchasing links for the site in other to achieve the desired SEO goals.

Using the black-hat method is guaranteed to result in a penalty from Google, which may lead to a demotion in search engine rankings or worse —de-indexing of the site.

There is only one right way of earning links to your website or blog, and it is through active collaboration with the sites you intend to get back-links from.

Placing Too Many Links in the Site’s Content

While it is alright to have a few citation-links to authoritative sites for the purpose of improving your site’s reputation, you should never willy-nilly add links to your site’s content just because you want it to rank higher on the search engine result page.

Depending on the word-count of a write-up, the average number of links that is appropriate for SEO purpose is 3-4. Anything more than this, unless the article is over 2000 words, is considered too much and risks the wrath of Google.

While adding too many links is considered unethical, linking to a landing page that is irrelevant to the subject of the article and the anchor text, in particular, is fraudulent and is guaranteed to get your site penalized by the search engine.

Linking to poor quality and spam sites is also an erroneous practice, that should never be engaged in unless you wish to destroy all your hard work by being at the receiving end of a penalty from Google.

Focusing Solely on Short Tail Keywords

Many site owners pay too much attention to using short tail keywords in their attempt to optimize their sites for search engine rankings. This is wrong since the competition for short tail keywords is so massive that you are unlikely to be ranked higher for it, regardless of the strategies you use to make it happen.

Long tail keywords, consisting of 3 or more words, are your best bet for achieving high search engine rankings regardless of the niche your site belongs to. This is because they are more specific in action and tend to target sets of words that are often entered as queries by web visitors using search engine platforms.

Using Irrelevant Content

If your content isn’t duplicated yet still fails to be relevant, then it isn’t going to have any impact on your SEO strategy. Only relevant content that provides valuable information can keep web visitors. If the web visitors find out that the article is basically useless, then it leads to incredible bounce rates that will certainly ruin your site’s search engine status.

Though an SEO strategy is critical to the success of a web platform, it is important to know that if it is wrongly executed, it will surely lead to a catastrophic outcome for the website or blog.

Summary

There are certain decisions you take concerning your website or blog that may negatively affect your SEO effort. These mistakes aren’t only detrimental to the site’s search engine rankings; they also affect your site’s appeal to new visitors. Here are the 6 mistakes that are guaranteed to hurt your site’s search engine rankings and ruin your chance of improving its traffic.

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6 Costly Mistakes That Will Hurt Your Site’s Search Engine Ranking

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