There are mistakes that are common to most websites and they all affect the search engine ranking of the sites. Most of these mistakes are related to Search Engine Optimization, SEO, and many are design elements. We shall look at all of them in this post especially the common ones that affect a website ranking.
You wull also want to read:
Adding a sitemap to your website
Designing a Website Like a Search Engine Crawler
Essential Tips For Good Website Designing
Google Webmaster Tools Introduction
Improve Your SEO in Four Simple Ways
SEO Ranking and Website Speed
Let us first look at the search engine mistakes.
1. Search Engine Mistakes
All search engine marketers try desperately to promote trends that boost their search engine visibility. SEO is immensely important to improving your website’s visibility, driving more traffic and better conversion rates.
The first thing one can do is to avoid making mistakes. Following “SEO Best Practices” can be difficult for most webmasters especially when making frantic efforts to gain search engine ranks. With search engines, especially Google, changing algorithms on a periodic basis, every SEO strategy needs to adapt and adjust to the latest techniques while giving up on age-old practices. Here are some of the most common mistakes made by SEO experts:
Not optimizing images with content
Optimizing images is sometimes an overlooked aspect of the SEO strategy. Poorly optimized images slow down website speed and affect its performance. Website speed has become an important raning factor for search engines and not just that, it affects user experience.
Additionally, adding target keywords to images relevant to the rest of the content helps search engines understand them. A link to the image with just numbers and alphabets in odd positions does not convey anything but some relevant words and numbers would matter. One should incorporate descriptive keywords for every image. Including some relevant alt texts. They all will help search engines to find the images in relevant searches and enhance the accessibility of the site.
You wull also want to read:
Adding a sitemap to your website
Designing a Website Like a Search Engine Crawler
Essential Tips For Good Website Designing
Google Webmaster Tools Introduction
Improve Your SEO in Four Simple Ways
SEO Ranking and Website Speed
Keyword stuffing
Keywords are still relevant for search engine placement. It helps the search engines understand a website and its focus. Websites contain varied types of content in terms of text. One needs keywords for SEO and use of right keywords is important for getting the right audience. Optimizing the use of keywords will be helpful in gaining popularity in search engines. But keyword stuffing will ruin your website ranking and serach engine optimization efforts since cramming a keyword multiple times makes content worthless. Only keywords do not get customers to a website. Also, Google algorithms will get the site blacklisted and also give it a bad ranking.
Not Setting Up URL Canonicalization
Canonicalization is a good way to deal with duplicate content. When implementing an SEO strategy, make sure that you do not have duplicate content on the site. If there is identical content for online access using different URLs, you need to identify the right page for visitors and implement a canonical to help search engines know that it is not a duplicate version. When websites report content with www and without www, sometime this can be seen as duplicates. Implementing canonicalization is a good way to fix this issue. This is done, in most cases, using the .htaccess file. There are also some plugins that can be used to set up canonicalization for urls.
Lack of Regular Updates
Content is food for search engines and if search engines will be forced to love our page, you have to provide this food sufficiently and consistently. Failing to update your website regularly forces Google to loose interest in your web page and causes a loss in ranking.
Lack of Sitemaps.
Sitemaps help Google navigate your website with ease and also helps Google and other search engines inde your pages easily. Sitemaps are also good for your site users and can help improve user experience. You need to include a sitemap to your website and also submit the same to Google.
Robots.txt file
The robots.txt file will help set parameters for indexing. You can tell the search engines which files or folders to pick content from for indeing and which to ignore. These are good for managing content on the web and to define what you want indeed and what you do not want idexed. It particularly helps website managers manage cases of duplicate content like archive pages, catagories and others cases that produce duplicate content.
Metadata
These include the website title, discription and keywords. Although Google no longer use keywords in its search ranking, some other search engines do . Non-th-less, you need to take your website title ver seriously, ensuring that it contain the primary ad secondary keywords for which you want to rank. The same goes for your website descriptions. It is good you write descriptions from the content with which you have built your homepage and particularly from the above the folder content. These are considered very important by search engines.
You wull also want to read:
Adding a sitemap to your website
Designing a Website Like a Search Engine Crawler
Essential Tips For Good Website Designing
Google Webmaster Tools Introduction
Improve Your SEO in Four Simple Ways
SEO Ranking and Website Speed
Disregarding Pages by Not Indexing Them
Sometimes, there are pages that are not indexed in the search engine result pages. One should not forget indexing pages. Pages that are broken or missing are going to avoid search engine results altogether because pages indicating 404 error are excluded. A high number of 404s leads to an increase in bounce rate and visitors will feel cheated of any information. Search engines crawl websites and rank them and 404 pages interrupt their process. It is important not to have broken links on your site and keep the website active.
Website updates
Failing to keep up with updates can slow down visitor traffic. After spending months to create an interactive and attractive website, one should try to keep it updated with consistent blog posts or some other content updates. Updating regularly will feed your visitors with relevant information and they might convert to leads.
One needs to make a schedule for posting different posts related to your field on a regular basis, and consistency will get you the attention of search engines too.
Neglecting social media
Social media marketing has become a useful tool for driving relevant traffic to websites today. No one can take social media for granted in today’s online business. In fact, neglecting social media can be a costly mistake in this day and age. Social media is no longer an optional marketing ploy but a necessity for businesses. By being conversant and relevant on popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter, one can enhance a company’s image and credibility. Sharing your content will lead the search engines and drive potential visitors to your site. Social media following can also boost brand awareness amongst loyalists.
Poor or Lack of internal links
Sometimes, it is thought that it is erroneous to link to one’s own content and even think that search engines might read into it and even blacklist the pages. Despite what you may think, internal links to website is great for SEO and helps search engines to crawl to better your website. One should focus on the most important pages of any site and strategize posts to link back to those pages. One should find a real connection between pages to do the linking task.
Poor Use of Performance Measures
Improving SEO is not just to tweak some settings. One needs to check and measure the level of progress on a constant basis. One should know the current standing when you start, and then track the changes. With solid metrics in place, one will know that the SEO practices have been working or not. If you do not think that there has been any progress, then it is preferable to change the approach.
2. Mistakes Associated with Design Elements
1. Too much clutter
You need to be mindful about the amount of information you put out to customers. Sometimes to complete a sale, a customer needs to only know a certain amount of information in order to buy. Too much information and you possibly confuse, overwhelm or just simply waste their time. This principle should apply to a business website.
Clutter could take the form of: images all over the place, links for days, novels for copy, or even worse a footer full of zip codes! You have a very small amount of time to capture the user’s attention. Though you will try to provide as much information, too much of it could hurt your entire business.
2. Not enough content
Although you want to avoid providing too much or some excessive information, you still need to provide certain level of content to achieve success. You can design the most beautiful website out there. However, if it doesn’t have great content or enough information for customers, it becomes difficult for them to learn about your products or services? And not to mention it being passed over by the search engines.
You should have the right amount of content when you launch your site, but you should also keep in mind that your website will never be complete. You will need to continually add more content to your site, like videos.
3. Flash
Flash has its uses, and those applications on the web are becoming less and less utilized. Most of the small animations that you would use flash can now be done with jquery and html5. So our advice is to not use it at all.
