Common SEO Mistakes that can Kill Your Website

Effective search engine optimisation helps customers find you. While there are some fixed guidelines that can help your website rank highly among the top websites on the search engines, there are some mistakes that often cause failure of the website.
If you want your website to appear among the top 10 sites in SERPs, you must avoid these commonly committed mistakes in search engine optimisation.
MISTAKE 1: Lack of understanding of SEO guidelines- This mistake is often committed by amateurs who try to think out of the box and in doing so they mostly violate the guidelines offered by most of the search engines. It is important to understand that breaking the guidelines might result in your website being banned from a search engine.
MISTAKE2: Untitled web pages- Titles reflect the content of the web pages. A web page without a title is like a faceless body, which makes the content appear ambiguous. Unfortunately, there are several websites that can be found without proper web page titles. A look at this link would show how ambiguous a web page appears without a title-http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-47%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allintitle%3A%22untitled+document %22
Though the websites listed here are creative in their own sense, adding proper titles would benefit in search engine optimisation.
MISTAKE 3: Duplicate or unoptimised content- Many content farms exist on the web that offer articles on various topics that have been copied from other sources. This is plagiarism and can have a serious implication on the effectiveness of the website. Many of the major search engines take strict actions against such sites. Tools, such as recently introduced Google Panda, are the efforts against low-quality content providers. Poorly written content, which is not well optimised, is also a mistake that can adversely affect your SEO-effectiveness. For instance, if you write content on water coolers, without mentioning the keyword ‘water coolers’, then your site would not rank highly on the search engines because it fails to convey what product is the content talking about. Thus, it is important to optimise the content through proper keyword identification and implementation.

MISTAKE 4: Too many images and Flash animations- Images and animation make your site look attractive to the visitors. However, a plethora of images and Flash animations would increase the load time of the site which becomes a deterrent for the visitors and might lead to high bounce rate. One should use images and Flash animation that describe the content, without overdoing it.

MISTAKE 5: Poor internal linking- Links are the connections between websites and are critical in increasing the web traffic. Search engines find pages on your website by following the links from other pages on your site. Using words such as “click here” or “learn more” in internal links is a big mistake because the search engines fail to understand what the page being linked is all about.

MISTAKE 6: Weak external link strategy- This is another mistake which commonly occurs during website development. Getting quality links to your site is not an easy task, but it is important nevertheless because the more other sites link to your site, the more search engines will count your website as worthy of sending other users to and higher your search ranking. The best way to encourage people to link to your site is by having high-quality content.

MISTAKE 7: Having outdated data- Creating a good website is not the end of task, when it comes to search engine optimisation. If the content on the site is not regularly updated, the site will become irrelevant and would be at risk of losing its higher rankings on SERPs. Staying current on changes in the industry is important to give your site an advantage over the others.

MISTAKE 8: Using Black Hat SEO Techniques- Improving your search engine optimisation through tricks and unethical techniques would not help you for long. This is so because search engines like Google keep a tab on such activities and take stern efforts to curb them. Some of the black hat techniques that must be avoided include spamming, excessive use of keywords and setting up link farms. Such activities might initially help your site to rank highly on search engines and may increase visitor traffic. But eventually, you’ll see high bounce rate and lower rankings.

If you have been committing any of the above mentioned mistakes and were clueless about their impact, now you know what they were doing to your website. Implement the required changes to your site through search engine optimisation to make it visitor-friendly and search engine-friendly.