9 SEO-Mistakes That Are Killing Your Website’s Promotion: Website optimization is a complicated process, that involves a lot of work. If it seems to you that everything is perfect, then check your website once again! Indeed, many factors influence the ranking in search results; sometimes, even the minor details influence the results of website promotion.
9 SEO-Mistakes That Are Killing Your Website’s Promotion
Table of Contents
We have picked up 9 SEO-mistakes that can make a website lose its position in the search results.
Carefully read this article to avoid that, or just order a website from a professional web design studio: this way you can be sure that all the important aspects of creating a site are thought out by experienced professionals!
Search engine sanctions and filters
As a rule, some do not even realize that their site had fallen under filters. But you will notice some strange things happening to your site: it jumps in positions in the search, the amount of traffic suddenly decreases, etc.
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Your site can fall under Google filters for various reasons:
- non-unique content;
- over-optimization of texts with keys;
- hidden text;
- unsystematic link building;
- selling a huge number of links;
- cheating with behavioral indicators;
- aggressive advertising, multiple pop-ups;
- virus-infected website;
- clickjacking, cloaking, crypto-jacking, phishing and so on.
There are many ways to check if your website had fallen under the search engine filters.
The easiest one is finding information on Google’s manual sanctions in the “Measures taken by hand” section in Google Search Console. In most cases, you’ll find the information about sanctions there.
Also, to quickly check the number of pages in the index, go to the search engine you are interested in and enter the query site:yourdomain.com (without space). A huge reduction in the number of pages to 1-10 is a sure sign of filtering.
Content
Clichés are annoying for everyone. How can someone decide that your offer is unique and make a purchase decision if the texts are the same everywhere?! Therefore, pay attention to the quality of the content – it must be unique! Also, do not forget about the USP.
If you have copied the content from somewhere and just pasted it to your website without any changes, your website can fell under search sanctions that may negatively affect its search rankings. You can check your site with the help of anti-plagiarism online checkers.
Title and description tags, H1-H3
Properly selected keywords are the basics of SEO promotion. Besides, this is one of the factors affecting the relevance of the page.
We have often met that the title and description are filled incorrectly. The two most common mistakes are either a complete lack of keywords or over spam in the header.
You should not do this, try to find a compromise! And do not forget that tags should look good not only for robots but also for people.
HTTPS site protocol
At the beginning of 2017, Google began to mark all sites that contain forms that transmit personal data as insecure. This item also affects the ranking of the site in the search results.
If you have not yet moved to https, then we recommend that you do this as soon as possible. Another important point is the correct algorithm of actions.
The most common mistake is that many site owners simply configure a 301 redirect from the old version of HTTP to https after purchasing an SSL certificate. But they forget about the robots.txt file, the Host directive, and setting up webmasters. Therefore, the website that is using HTTP protocol drops out of the search index. And since the new site on https has not yet been indexed, the website loses its positions.
Robots.txt
This file is created for search robots, and you need to specify the site indexing parameters for bots in it.
There are cases when website owners completely forget about robots.txt. For example, a site was recently launched, and it did not have robots.txt but was completely open for indexing.
Sometimes it also happens that the site is completely closed from indexing. The Disallow and Allow directives are responsible for this, which prohibit or allow indexing of sections, individual pages of a site or files. You can use special Google tools to check your Robots.txt file.
Duplicate content
Pages can be completely or partially identical to each other, still having different URLs.
Search robots don’t like such duplicate pages, if you have found that your website has pages like that, we recommend that you remove them. In 90% of cases SEO, duplicate pages are killing your website’s promotion!
Mirror sites
The mirror website is a complete copy of the site, available at different addresses. It is important to 301 all the mirror websites to the main website. If you don’t do that, then the indicators of the current citation index, the weight of external links will spread, since for search engines these are different resources. All this won’t let the website get to the top positions in search results.
Here is a small checklist:
- The site should be accessible only through one HTTP or https protocol.
- 301 redirects are configured from all mirrors.
- The main page of the site is available at one address without «/index.php», «/index.html», etc.
Mobile-friendly layout
Users are increasingly using mobile devices to search the Web. Also, the proportion of mobile traffic exceeds desktop traffic.
So if your website’s layout is not mobile-friendly yet, then it is time to fix it: otherwise, the website rank will get worse!
Page load time
Everything is simple here: users do not like slow sites!
Search engines also like fast, optimized sites. You can check your site load speed using Google «Pagespeed Insights» tool.
