Are These Basic SEO Mistakes Hurting Your Search Engine Rankings?
Marketers can achieve top results by using SEO to raise the position of their websites in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). However, there are certain basic SEO errors to avoid when performing Search Engine Optimization. If marketers make any of these errors, they risk damaging their online reputation and search engine ranking.
Seven common SEO errors that you must avoid are listed below.
Improper Keyword Optimization For Your Website
The first stage in any SEO campaign is selecting the appropriate keywords for which you should optimize your website. All the time and effort you put into trying to get your site a high rank will be wasted if you initially select the incorrect keywords. What use are high rankings if you select keywords that no one searches for or if you don’t choose keywords that will drive relevant traffic to your website?
The good news is that there are a few indicators that suggest you might be optimizing for the wrong keywords. The following are some of these:
- A little to non-existent organic visibility.
- Having lots of impressions but little click-through.
- Having a high bounce rate or a poor time on page.
The co-founder of Crazy Egg and Hello Bar and SEO guru Neil Patel claims:
You won’t likely score highly in search engine results pages if you attempt to optimize the content of your website for every term you can think of. Even worse, you’ll have a high bounce rate since visitors who eventually reach your website through a search engine will depart without taking the action you want them to. In actuality, failing to optimize the content of your website for relevant keywords will seriously hurt your search engine rankings.
Using An Excessive Number Of Keywords In The Meta Keywords Tag
To score effectively for certain keywords, we frequently encounter websites with hundreds of phrases specified in the meta keywords element. The opposite is true in every way. Contrary to popular belief, the meta keywords element no longer serves much of a purpose in terms of search engine positioning. Google does not directly incorporate keyword meta tags into its results. Therefore, you will never be able to achieve a high rank simply by entering keywords in the meta keywords tag. Since your search engine ranking has nothing to do with the terms you place into a Meta tag. You must naturally incorporate the keywords into the page’s real body text if you want to rank highly for those phrases.
Using The Same Keyword Too Frequently
Repeating your target keywords in the body of your pages and your meta keyword tags continuously is another typical mistake that people do. The search engines keep a close eye out for this strategy because so many people have used it in the past (and still use it), and they may punish a site that uses it. Yes, you do need to use the terms repeatedly. However, the placement of the keywords on your pages must be grammatically correct. It is no longer enough to just keep repeating the keywords. Additionally, in your Meta Keywords tag, a particular keyword should ideally not appear more than three times.
Making A Bunch Of Similar Doorway Pages
Another popular misconception is that since each search engine’s algorithm is unique, users must construct unique pages for different search engines. Although this is a terrific idea in principle, it has the opposite effect in reality. This strategy will fast result in hundreds of pages, which can quickly turn into an administrative nightmare. Additionally, consider the time you will need to invest in upgrading the sites regularly to reflect changes that the search engines make to their algorithms. The pages will also end up looking rather similar to one another despite being designed for several search engines. When a site creates similar pages, search engines are frequently able to recognise it and may penalise or even remove the site from their index.
Google claims that doorway sites can direct users to numerous pages that are similar and ultimately lead to the same general location. Users may also be directed to pages that are not as helpful as the final destination due to these links. Therefore, design a single page that is optimised for a single keyword for all search engines rather than different pages for various search engines.
The Use Of Hidden Text
For instance, imagine your page’s backdrop is white and you’ve added some white text to it. That is viewed as a black-hat SEO technique. Many webmasters want to make their pages as keyword-rich as possible to achieve high search engine ranks. There is a maximum number of times a keyword can appear on a page without making it seem strange to your visitors. Therefore, many webmasters add text (containing the keywords) with the same colour as the background colour to a page to avoid human visitors perceiving the text as unusual while maintaining the website’s keyword density. By doing this, it is ensured that only search engines may see the terms and not actual site users. This tactic has long since been discovered by search engines, which now ignore or penalise pages with similar language. If even one page on that site has such concealed text, they might also punish the entire website. The issue with this, though, is that search engines may frequently end up penalising websites that did not intentionally use hidden language.
Consider a page with a white backdrop and a table on it that has a black background. Let’s say you put some white text on that table as well. This text won’t be hidden; rather, it will be visible to your human visitors. Search engines, however, can interpret this as concealed text because they frequently fail to take into account the fact that the table’s background is black. Therefore, to prevent your site from being punished, you must review all the pages of your site to determine whether you accidentally made any errors of this nature.
Employing Page Cloaking
Cloaking is prohibited by Google’s webmaster standards and is described as follows:
“The practice of showing alternate content or URLs to users and search engines is known as cloaking. It’s possible that serving up different results dependent on user agents will make Google consider your site to be deceptive and remove it from its index.”
Page cloaking is typically used for two reasons:
- To prevent their rivals from seeing the source code of their pages that have been optimized for search engines.
- To avoid forcing human visitors to view a website that appeals to search engines but may not necessarily appeal to humans.
The issue with this is that when a website employs cloaking, it makes it impossible for search engines to spider the exact page that people will see. And if the search engines are unable to do this, they can no longer be certain that they are giving their users results that are relevant. So, if a search engine learns that a site has employed cloaking, it will likely permanently remove the site from its index. Therefore, we recommend that you not even consider employing cloaking on your website. If you are already using cloaking and getting away with it, I suppose you may need to be vigilant.
Investing Excessive Time In Search Engine Positioning
People commonly waste too much time on search engine optimization, which is another typical error. Search engine optimization (SEO) is indeed the most economical approach to increase traffic to your website, and you do need to dedicate some daily time to understanding how search engines operate and optimising your website for them.
However, keep in mind that search engine optimization is a means to a goal for you, not an end in itself. Increasing the sales of your goods and services is the goal. As a result, in addition to working to increase your website’s ranking in search engines, you also need to focus on all the other elements that can make or break your website, such as the value of the goods and services you provide, the grade of your content, and so on. Even if you have top search engine rankings, they won’t help you much if your goods and services are of bad quality, or if you don’t provide SEO material of the highest calibre.
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