Bad SEO Practices That Sabotage Your Rankings
SEO is crucial to rank a website, so it will gain traffic and possibly earn money once monetized. All website owners exhaust all possible means of optimization, but some fall prey to some bad practices.
A sudden decline in traffic and poor rankings are just some tell-tale signs that you’re doing something wrong on your optimization.
What you need to do here is to assess and audit your SEO methods. Chances are you’re committing some of these mistakes:
*Using Heading tags for formatting on your website
You can use as many H1, H2, H3, etc., tags on your website as you like. Every page should have one H1 tag and one H2 tag at least. What kills websites is when H tags are overused or are used purely for formatting.
Web crawlers can detect the inappropriate use of H tags and penalize your site for doing so. This will affect your ranking and the indexability of your pages.
The correct way to use H tags is to use them structurally. Think of H1 tags as a chapter, H2 tags as a sub-chapter snd H3 tags as a sub-sub-chapter. One should always follow the other and they should nestle underneath each other. Note, it is completely okay to have several H2 tags after an H1 tag.
*Using spammy content
Google hates spammy content and the search engine sees to it that spammy websites get penalized for such a bad practice.
Spammy content like commenting with unrelated and stuffy links on threads, sending spammy push notifications on subscribers, and more are just some of the typical examples.
However, some website owners even pay writers to do this. It’s a desperate move, and although it may give additional traffic, it will become detrimental later on.
*Duplicating content
Duplicate content is a two-edged sword. Copying and plagiarizing blocks of content is a no-no, not just in Google but in the entire writing practice.
However, Google has a specific definition to duplicate content – the one that they use to define which one to penalize.
According to the search engine, duplicate content is “matching or appreciably similar blocks of content present in more than one location on the web”.
This sets the record straight, as it’s almost impossible to write 100% unique content. With millions of pages on the web, many websites may use the same words and talk about the same things.
*Placing too many ads
Too many ads on the above-fold of your website will earn you a thumbs-down from Google. This practice defeats the purpose of information. Aside from that, it will put off visitors due to the eyesore of excessive advertisement banners.
The above-fold is the part of the website that’s visible without scrolling. Since it’s also the first portion that your readers see, ads aren’t the best first impression to give.
*Overkilling keyword optimization
This one is a classic mistake: keyword stuffing. Over-optimizing your pages with the same keyword will get you penalized by Google.
Also, it’s unappealing for readers to read the same lines over and over again. This double whammy will send your website to the depths of SERPs.
If you want to optimize your content well, use latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords instead. These keywords are in the same topic, but not directly synonymous to your main keyword.
Also, the rule of thumb is 0.5% keyword density. Anyway, 1% can be forgivable. Anything beyond that is too much.
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