Website Mistakes That Can Affect Your SEO

Achieving a high ranking with search engines isn’t done accidentally. In fact, there is a great deal that goes into creating a website with strong SEO that will increase your website’s Google or other search engine ranking. In order to make sure your SEO is working for you and not against you, you want to make sure you stay away from the biggest website mistakes that can affect your SEO. Below you will find a list of SEO mistakes that can tank your site’s SEO efforts.

Bad Web Design

If your website is designed poorly, you will sink your SEO efforts. One of the first things you don’t want to do is to be overly creative when making your website’s links. This is crucial because search engines can’t recognize links made in graphics. Instead, your links should always be created in text format.

Eliminate Text in Flash

Another sign of poor web design is having text in Flash. Research has shown that visitors aren’t comfortable with moving, flashing images. When search engines are crawling a site, they cannot recognize text that is encoded in Flash. This means all the work you put into your content won’t gain you any credibility with the search engines. To make sure you aren’t wasting the content on your site, make sure all content, especially keywords, is in plain text.

Don’t Replace Content With Images

In regards to content, it is also essential not to replace content with images. While images can jazz up a page, it can hurt your SEO if your header text is not recognized by search engines. Instead of graphics as headers, make sure to always use h1 and h2 tags instead. Doing this will ensure that your content is recognized by search engines.

Stay Away From Java Splash Pages

You also don’t want to use Java splash pages. Splash pages are exciting, and look fancy, but they are also a problem for your SEO. Similar to Flash, the problem with splash pages is that search engines can’t read them. So, if you create a site completely made of Java splash pages, it means your site will look blank to search engines.

Avoid Annoying Pop-Ups

Pop-ups are extremely obnoxious, and they can also destroy your SEO efforts because search engines will block them. If a pop-up makes it through to users, it will most likely be closed immediately by the user because they are considered a nuisance. It’s important to remember if a user, or even worse, Google thinks your pop-up is spam, it will affect your site’s index and ultimately your website’s productivity as well.

Inconsistent Layouts on the Site

Every website should have a global navigation bar. It ensures that search engines and your users can’t get lost on your website. If you fail to include this handy tool, on all your pages, it will likely suffer reputation damaging consequences.

Bad Title Tags

One of the most valuable parts of strong SEO on a webpage is titles. Search engines look for titles on your page, and make an assessment of the webpage based on the titles. In addition to reading the tags, the search engine will also make sure the content matches the titles. For this reason, it is incredibly important that you use strong, appropriate SEO titles, and that your title is appropriate for your featured content.

Bad Link Exchanges

It’s important that you don’t use bad link exchanges on your website. A bad link exchange can tank your SEO efforts in a variety of ways. First, if you happen to link to a site that is blacklisted by Google, your site will suffer tremendously. You also want to make sure that all the pages your page links to are related to your website. If not, they won’t help your SEO efforts.

Ignore SEO Algorithm

Ultimately, the biggest mistake anyone can make that will destroy their SEO efforts is ignoring the SEO algorithm. To get on the top ten list of a search engine, you must understand search engine algorithms. To avoid ignoring the SEO algorithm, your site needs to be updated constantly. When search engine algorithms change, you need to implement changes to stay compliant.

Not Enough Content

It’s critical to remember that content is king when it comes to SEO. The easiest way to fail at SEO is to not have enough content on your website. However, adding poorly written content will not help your SEO rankings either. For best SEO results, you need to have an abundance of optimized content on your website.

Duplicate or Bad Content

While optimized content is your most powerful tool when it comes to SEO, it is also necessary to remember that duplicate or bad content will not help you at all. When search engines crawl your website, they will consider duplicate content as spam. For this reason, it is vital that you do not have content that constantly repeats itself.

In addition to duplicate content, you also don’t want to have content that uses keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is considered blackhat SEO, and is considered a big no-no in the world of SEO. To avoid keyword stuffing, you must use strong, relevant keywords in your website content.

Avoiding the SEO mistakes listed above will help you increase your SEO, and your site’s search engine rankings as well.