Things That can Hurt the Search Engine Rankings of Your Website

It’s been five years since I have been practicing and providing consultancy on all matters related to SEO and internet marketing. And in all these years I have come across numerous website owners who do all type of things that hurt their site’s rankings in the search engines.

Following is the list of some of the common SEO mistakes made by the site owners and some of the so called SEO experts:

1. Selection of Keywords - The first and probably the worst mistake the website owners usually make is the selection of keywords for their site. I have seen clients who will just look to target high traffic keywords without giving any thought to whether these keywords actually match with the website’s theme. And some will choose keywords which are extremely competitive and then expect to rank on those keywords within a month’s time.

2. Under Optimized and Over Optimized Titles – Title tag is probably the most important SEO technique that you can do on-page. It is always recommended to put your targeted keywords in the Title tag. But in trying to put keywords in the Title tag some website owners and SEO practitioners stuff this tag with more than one instances of the same or similar keyword, which is wrong. I have also seen cases wherein all the site pages have exactly the same Title tag, which is an absolute disaster talking from search engine’s point of view.

3. Same Metas on Every Page - One other commonly made mistake is keeping all the Meta description and Meta keywords tag same for all the pages on the site. Each page should have page specific and keyword targeted Meta tags.

4. Search Engine Unfriendly Redirects – There are many times when a site’s page URL changes due to change to dynamic platform or change in directory structure and there is a need to redirect the old URLs to new URLs. But the mistake website owners usually make is, they generally 302 redirect these URLs which is not a search engine friendly way of redirection. All old URLs should always be 301 permanently redirected to make the redirection search engine safe.

5. Insufficient Content – You must have heard the saying “Content is the King” and when it comes to SEO content is probably the God. And most website owners in trying to have an appealing and graphic rich website forget the importance of quality content.

6. Duplicate Content - One major issue most website owners are unaware of is the issue regarding duplicate content being present on several pages of the site. Each page of the site should have unique content.

7. Complete Flash Site – Flash is undoubtedly a great way of embedding images and graphics onto your site and sites made in Flash look pretty and appealing. But an all flash website is an absolute nightmare from search engine’s point of view because at present there is no way search engine crawlers can read content inside a flash file. But that does not mean you can't use Flash on your site, rather than making the entire site as one big flash file, the best way is to break site pages in individual flash files and then embed these files in respective HTML pages. This will allow each page of your site to have it’s own URL and then Flash optimization techniques can be used.

Olive Global is a search engine optimisation company and website promotion company offering ethical, innovative and result oriented Internet marketing services in UK.

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