SEO is an important part of your website promotion. It will help you to attract organic traffic to your website. When you do it right, it will significantly increase your traffic.
But, when you do it wrong, it will ruin your website traffic. That’s why you shouldn’t play with SEO because it can backfire you anytime. Here are 7 common SEO mistakes that will ruin your website traffic:
1. SEO-unfriendly website design
Your website design is not just for appearance purpose. It will contribute to your search engine position as well. Some website designs are difficult to get indexed by the search engine, while some other designs are easily indexed by the search engine. Most people prefer graphical appearance instead of simplicity in their website design, while in reality the simplicity can help them to grab a good spot in the search engine result quickly. When you’re using SEO-unfriendly website design, you will tend to block your website from achieving a high rank in the search engine result.
2. Irrelevant keywords in your content
Search engines are looking for content with relevant keywords in it. If you put irrelevant keywords into your content, you will turn your content into a spam junk. In this way, search engines will avoid indexing your content in the search result. As a result, you won’t get what you aimed for. Instead of inserting irrelevant keywords into your content, you should insert relevant keywords into it. It will help you to improve your search engine ranking. Another important thing is that you shouldn’t put irrelevant content into your website.
3. Low quality backlinks
Most people think that the more backlinks they have, the higher their website ranking will be. This is a wrong thinking. Search engines don’t rank your content based on how many backlinks you have. They rank your content based on how many quality backlinks that you have. If you have more quality backlinks, you will have higher rank. Thus, the key is quality. Quality backlinks mean backlinks that come from reputable and popular websites. No matter how many low quality backlinks that you place for your website, you’ll still have a low rank if you don’t have any quality backlinks.
4. Flash, graphics, and other clutters
Flash content, as well as graphics, are unreadable by the search engine. Thus, when you put too many flash and graphics in your website, you are giving nothing for the search engine. As a result, search engines won’t be able to rank your website. This is also true with other clutters such as links and advertisements. Those clutters will only block your website from getting indexed by the search engines. So, you need to keep your website as simple as possible, with less clutter in it.
5. Bad URL and Page Title
Bad URL and page title are common mistakes that many novice webmasters are doing. Bad URL, such as www.yourwebsite.com/content/1.html and bad title, such as ‘Your Website – Number 1 Source of Information’ will not contribute anything to your search engine ranking, while in fact they can really help you to boost your rank. You should use a relevant page URL and page title for your website in order to make it easier for the search engine to index your website.
6. Using a free web hosting service
It is a well-known fact that free web host doesn’t have significant power and reputation in the search engine result. Thus, most websites that are created with a free web hosting service will have difficulty to rank highly in the search engine result. Also, by using a free web hosting service, you will not have full control over your website. This will make it difficult for you to make necessary changes that can help you to improve your search engine position. So, to avoid this problem, you have to use your own web host.
7. Dead links and duplicate content
You should check your links regularly and remove any dead links from your website because those links can hurt your search engine reputation. Search engines will regard dead links as useless links, so they will naturally remove their results that contain dead links. If your web pages contain dead links and you’re not removing them immediately, you will risk losing your web pages in the search engine result. It’s the same with duplicate content. Search engines will remove duplicate content from its search result, so if your website has much duplicate content, you will not be able to rank highly in the search engine result.
Those are 7 common Search Engine Optimization mistakes that will ruin your website traffic. Those mistakes will specifically reduce your organic traffic. That’s why you should avoid making the mistakes above in your website.
Author Bio: Sathishkumar Varatharajan is an Internet Marketer from Salem, experienced in helping businesses to achieve their goals in a cost effective way. He launched Kudo Metrics Internet Marketing Company India, in an effort to help all the small and medium sized businesses to achieve their targets and increase their profits.
