There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that SEO is more relevant than it ever has been, and it is critical that your business or blog has a clear focus on it. SEO and search engine marketing can drive more traffic to your site, it can elevate its standing and it can increase your chances of making partnerships across the web. There are however some very common mistakes which people make on their website, which actually damage how SEO-friendly it is. Here we take a look at what those errors are, and why you should avoid them in order to boost your standing with the search engine.
Page Load Speed
The most common reason for slow loading pages on your website are an overuse of media, failing to optimize images and clashes of multiple plug-ins on the site. Users have told us that they will on average not wait for more than 3 seconds for a page to load, and the search engines understand this. If therefore you have pages which are slow to load, you will be marked down by the search engine and it can damage your SEO credentials. Slow page loads are often easy to fix, but you have to be on the front foot with it.
Broken Links
There are websites out there which will tell you in a heartbeat how many broken links you have on your site, which is why leaving them in place makes no sense at all. If you do have broken links or broken media which has been embedded, it is also going to cause you harm. After all the search engines are committed to recommending sites to its users which are going to offer them a great experience, so there is no motivation for them to do so with a site which is full of broken links.
Keywords Stuffing
When you are writing content it is very important that you spend some time on researching keywords which you can rank for. A common mistake which so many make however is to do something called keyword stuffing. This happens when you repeatedly mention the same keyword in your content, so much so that it is very apparent what you are trying to do. The search engine crawlers are smarter than this however, and as much as they like a keyword, they will pick up on stuffing in no time at all.
Poor Content
Search engine crawlers are also going to be looking at the quality of your content and if there are errors in there or if it just doesn’t provide any value then you are going to find yourself doing more harm than good. At the very least you should ensure that your content is written correctly and that it features no mistakes regarding grammar and punctuation. There are so many tools which can help you with this that there are no excuses for not making sure that you have great content on your site.
These are the mistakes to avoid if you want an SEO-friendly website.
