Last Updated on January 15, 2019
Search Engine Optimization intends to enhance the website rankings in a fair manner and get more and more traffic for your website. But, many of the website owners make mistakes regarding their website optimization and act as self-destructors for their website rankings and traffic. Here are some of the mistakes that have a massive impact on your website rankings.
- Not Relying on Google Keyword Planner
Most website owners believe that using Google Keyword Tool is a kind of cheating and that the tool provides just queries you can use to frame the content. But the fact is, Google Keyword Tool gives sufficient choices to elect long tail keywords and include them in the content to enhance the traffic for your website. Not using the Google Keyword Tool is one of the biggest SEO mistakes since with this tool you can understand much about the choices of the users while surfing the internet and their popular searches about a particular topic. This will help you to know your users better and include the keywords in your content that can gain you more traffic and searches and improve your website rankings.
The other biggest mistake website owners commit is, targeting high traffic keywords for their posts. They believe that this move can help them get more website traffic. The fact is that high traffic keywords face tough competition and hence cannot gain many numbers of searches. One can look for long tail keywords which have less competition in the bid for gaining more and more traffic for the posts they publish.
- Not Using Unique Title Tags and Descriptions
Many webmasters don’t use unique title tags and descriptions but rely on popular titles and descriptions they used earlier. Another mistake they commit is, they will use the same title for different pages of a website. Using the title for the first page will be fine but using the same title and description till the end might confuse the searchers and this will impact the search engine rankings. Here are some of the mistakes that impact search engine rankings on Google and Bing.
- Using the same title on all the pages of the website.
- Using the name of the website on the page title. It will be fine on the homepage but seems awkward if the same pattern is followed on all the pages of the website.
- Lengthy page titles exceeding 65 characters.
Take care that the descriptions are unique and will be in between 150-160 characters. Be cautious that you will not stuff the keyword the description and that it attracts the readers at a glance. A good description about the page helps to improve the Click Through Rate or CTR and if the content is relevant to the description provided earlier, you can expect a higher conversion rate.
- Indifference to Social Media
Social networking sites are the powerful media to promote content. The biggest mistake webmasters make is not being active in at least one social media platform. Undoubtedly, social media is one of the greatest factors to enhance SEO rankings of a website and the content or websites promoted on social media can gain a huge number of audience easier when compared to traditional means. Useful content promoted on social media can gain better ranking for your website. Most of the SEO experts opine that being active on social media is the best way to get the best optimization for your website and improve the rankings.
- Not Promoting your Website
You might post good content on your website but might feel reluctant to publish them on social media. This is not a good move because it will leave a negative impact however good your content might be. Promoting content and posts you have worked on is not a thing to be afraid of and if you promote your work on social media, your website reaches more and more audience. Having tens of twitter followers, hundreds of email subscribers and thousands of Facebook followers is not enough to get huge rankings for your website.
The most fruitful ways of promoting your blog posts or content are:
- Post your works on all your social networking accounts, both personal and professional.
- Share the content to both of your personal and professional followers.
- Considering the audience who make an average number of visits, promote your content using Facebook ads.
- Make the use of LinkedIn Platform posts for longer posts. Create summary for your posts and publish them in the LinkedIn profiles.
- Create internal links of your post to the older posts.
- Write guest posts for authorized websites and link them to your social media profiles and the content you want to publish on your website.
- Share the content to your email lists and email subscribers.
- Not Registering Your Website to Google or Bing
Another mistake most of the webmasters make is not registering their site with Google or Bing. Registering websites with Google or Bing webmaster tools makes the optimization of your website a cakewalk and enhances your website rankings. The feedback given by search engine tools will help you out to take more steps to enhance your website rankings. The process of registering with Google or Bing webmaster tools is very easy for even the beginners.
- Lack of Proper Publishing Plan
Most of the webmasters fail to publish their content systematically and this will impact the rankings badly. You might not publish the content daily but have a consistent plan about how many times in a week you can publish new content on your website. Prepare the blog posts a week or 10 days in advance whenever you need to publish new content and try to fabricate new posts or articles well before the schedule. Having a consistent plan to publish the posts help you to improve your website rankings. Neil Patel explains some of the SEO techniques in publishing content and gain more and more searches in his post about consistent methods of publicity.
7. Quality of the content
Most of the webmasters fail to publish high-quality content frequently. This is an important factor that reduces the website traffic. Authority and trust are the latest SEO factors for good website rankings. You need to keep up the trust of the readers and authority through the search engine. For building the trust of the readers, you need to publish high-quality content on your website frequently. Here are some of the characteristics of high-quality content.
- Accuracy
- Analytical
- Useful and Informative
- Unbiased
- Not making internal links
Internal linking is necessary for the webmasters to enhance the website rankings in the following ways;
- Search engines will discover more pages.
- Links to the internal pages give suggestions to the search engines that this page is important to your site.
- The users can find more relevant content for their searches by internal linking.
Most of the webmasters neglect the internal links feeling that they are the waste of time but internal linking is the good SEO technique that enhances the website rankings.
Some of the best practices for internal linking are as follows-
- Depending on the length and type of the content, try to have 2-10 internal links on the page.
- You can link relevant pages within the text and also include information about the relevant pages at the end of each page.
- Don’t stick to the rule that the keywords should be used in anchor texts but try to include keywords naturally in the text of the content.
- Always assure that the pages you need to get more rankings on SERPS should have the number of internal links. You can use the Google Webmaster Tools to get information about the website traffic and then fix the internal links.
- Website loading rate
Slow loading websites have a negative effect on rankings. The best loading speed for websites is less than 3 seconds. Google and Bing try their best to give a faster website for their clients first and these faster websites gain more business. Not considering poor loading speed as the ranking factor is a blunder that most of the webmasters do. If you have running ads on your website, the faster your website, the more will be your ad revenue, according to the reports of Google Adsense.
To improve the loading speed of your website, you can take the help of the Google Insights tool if you want to fix the issue by yourself. Taking the help of a professional to improve the page loading speed is a potential option to enhance your website rankings fast. You can hire a developer from Odesk.com,Peopleperhour.com or SeoEaze to improve the page loading speed of your website.
- Building Incoming links too fast
If you build your incoming links too fast, sometimes your website rankings might go down. Some experts use the term promotion to link building. Link-building can be otherwise called as off-page SEO. It is one of the important processes to improve search engine rankings.
Don’t commit the following mistakes to build links for your website-
- Don’t build links too faster with the websites. Go slow and steady since you might get through poor quality links and lose the reputation if you act in a rush in link building.
- Google may penalize the websites if they use anchor text in linking the keywords. Earlier, using anchor text for linking keywords is a good SEO technique but for now, it is a poor idea.
- It is better to link different posts to different pages instead of linking all the pages to the homepage. Diversifying links can improve loading speed and search engine rankings.
- Either free or paid, it is not a good idea to exchange the links of your content with bloggers.
Bottom line
This is not the end of the list but one should be careful about the above things. There are many SEO mistakes that even experienced webmasters commit but the above mentioned are the important ones while promoting a website and optimizing them to improve the website rankings.
