Getting your website up and running is one story. Getting it to show up on the top of search engines is another story. Listed below are some of the most common mistakes website owners commit that limits their online visibility with search engines.
1. Keyword stuffing. It seems like everyone from your neighbor to their dog is a search engine expert, and their most common advice is to “put keywords on every page.” While this tactic may have worked long ago, it hasn’t for quite some time. More specifically, keyword stuffing hasn’t worked since Google’s Panda algorithm rolled out. Keyword stuffing nowadays is more likely to bring you negative search engine results. Stop listening to outdated advice and toss the practice of keyword stuffing to the curb.
2. Copied content. Like keyword stuffing, your neighbor’s SEO guru dog may also tell you to create a lot of pages that talk about your target keywords. While content is important, it must be original and unique. Copying content from other sources is also likely to bring negative search engine results. Too much content scraping can even get your website penalized and removed from Google’s index entirely.
3. Duplicating your own content. Well if you can’t copy content from other websites, just re-purpose your own favorite pages dozens of times over, right? Wrong. Google has improved its ability to detect content that is shuffled around but is largely the same.
4. Broken links. Audit your website to ensure that older content isn’t linking to urls that have since changed. Search engines try to position themselves to review your website as if they were a customer. Customers don’t like hitting a dead page after clicking a broken link and neither do search engines.
5. Using Meta keywords. Google hasn’t cared much for Meta keyword tags since 2009. Other search engines may even penalize your website for excessively stuffing meta keyword tags. If Google doesn’t care for them and others can ding you for using them improperly, just save time and eliminate meta keyword tags entirely.
6. Not integrating Analytics. How can you know what areas of your website are performing well or what areas could use some help? Integrating Analytics helps you measure your website’s performance, engagement, and conversions.