6 SEO Mistakes That Will Murder Your Website or Blog Ranking

6 SEO Mistakes That Will Murder Your Website or Blog Ranking

SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization is a marketing technique that is flexible yet very difficult to fully master. It cannot be avoided neither can it be overlooked. Do you know that over 80% of mobile traffic today comes from hundreds, thousands, and millions of Internet searches?

 Here are some more interesting things you should know:

• SEO focused leads amass an increase in performance by 14.6%
• Close to 75% of searchers never make it past the first page of search results page
• The top 3 results that shows on search engines like Bing and Google receive more than 61% of clicks

The stronghold of SEO in the digital marketing cannot be overemphasized. But, you must take great care not to overdo it too, because if you do, you are most likely to be penalised or ranked lower by popular search engines such as Google, Bing etc.

Although the core rules of Search Engine Optimization has undergone series of changes over the past years. A lot of beginners, intermediate and experienced gurus still commit mistakes that affect them negatively one way or another. Experience they say is the best teacher; learning from your experience can teach you quite a good number of things.

That is why we are going to share with you some mistakes you need to avoid when doing SEO for you blog or website(s). It can also be that your website or blog has been affected the mistakes. Are you even aware of such mistakes? Read on to find out 6 SEO mistakes you need to totally avoid.

1. The mistake of Using  A Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is when you lift off content from a website and place in another (word-for-word). This is very bad as it confuses the crawl bots; one or both websites will be flagged by search engine bots and this will negatively affect the SEO of your website.

But wait…. the problem of duplicate content can occur in diverse ways:

• The CMS platform you currently run your blog or website on might encounter errors which will need to be fixed ASAP
• If your web page is built in different languages
• When your website or blog website has multiple home pages
• If by chance, you do not set canonical tags for repetitive pages

If the persistent problem seems to be from your CMS platform, you can implement a Robots.txt to direct the crawl bots t specific parts of your blog or website that should not indexed.

Also, for every of your page that has a lot of redirections coming to it, applying the rel="canonical" link will quickly fix the problem of duplicate content issues.

Now, to fix multi-lingual pages problems, simply use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to help the page identify the most appropriate language based on geolocation.

2. Poor Choice of Theme/Design leading to Poor User Experience

The value Google places on site speed is very high. That is one of the factors that led to the release of Google’s Panda, the release cleared off low-quality web pages on search engines. UE (User experience) is usually evaluated through the use of metrics such as time amount of time spent by the user on a web page (dwell time) and the user behaviour pattern. If a visitor leaves a page a few milliseconds after visiting it, it could be attributed to a poor user experience.

The UE is not only about the use of high-quality imagery and graphics, but also churning out high quality content that are insightful and helpful so people can read and engage with. Your blog page loading speed matters a lot. For example, a web page that loads in under 3.2 seconds will enjoy better PR (page ranking) than a page which takes a longer duration.

The trick here is to reduce the number of plugins and extensions running on your web space so that your pages can load a whole lot faster.

3. Non-mobile friendly website or blog

About 80% of the world’s population now own a smart phone. This innovation owes its success to the fact that a lot of people now have easy and cheap access to the internet, mobile phones, tablets, gadgets and data.

To expose your business to this huge population, it needs to be optimized for proper responsiveness. It must possess the flexibility to easily fit into the screen dimensions of a user device without any form of hassle. Additionally, the biggest part of Internet searches today cokes from mobile device users. So it is more than worth it if your page is optimized for mobile users.  

4. Avoiding  building high-quality backlinks

It is no surprise that backlinks from highly established websites and authoritative blog or PR or guest post sources can not only increase your Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA) but can also increase the traffic your website or blog. Not building relevant high-quality backlinks the surest pathway to losing out on sales and traffic.

Be careful not to violate the rules by creating fake or spammy backlinks; this can easily backfire. Proper care should be taken to avoid building fake or wrong backlinks that can negatively affect your ranking.

5. Taking Security Lightly

Your website or blog security is another primary ranking signal. Search engine giants like Google and Bing coupled with the most popular CMS Wordpress are seen making moves and providing solutions by creating a web environment where exchange of data can occur securely without risks of cyber-attacks or loss of data.  

You will be shocked to find out that a lot of website owners often take security lightly and as a result, have the SEO scale tipped against their favour.  To gain some SEO juice with security, you just need to invest in a good SSL certificate and move the website to HTTPS from the previous HTTP. A lot of SSL certificates have been made available depending on the kind of online business you run.

6. Poor  Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions and SEO titles is a very important factor that you must consider if you plan to run a successful blog from home. Meta descripts serves as guides for every search bots. It assists the bot in speedily indexing of the page quicker and more correctly.

Summing It Up

SEO is a nebulous course. While you are busy trying out new things; mistakes are bound to be (even the most experienced webmasters commit mistakes).  However, the trick is to identify your mistakes and take corrective measures to prevent your blog or website from suffering for too long.

Conclusively, you have learnt today 6 of the most common SEO mistakes that can hurt the ranking of your blog or website ranking of any website. Keep them at heart and avoid them to keep your site on top of search engine results.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Balogun Owomide has a huge passion for spreading motivation, business and personal finance. I often write on my How to make money, a finance blog on topics ranging from motivation, startup ideas, to small business financing and loans, business plans, marketing and franchise opportunities. You can reach me on Facebook at Balogun Owomide.