This article outlines the 11 deadly sins of SEO. It will highlight the SEO mistakes you shouldn’t make as an SEO expert. Most search engines, especially Google, regularly release new algorithm updates that make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a dynamic field. It seems challenging to rank after every new update by Google, but if you follow the proper procedures, you’ll succeed and perform well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Today, SEO is about developing trust, relevancy, and reputation and offering users valuable products and services with authorized content. Whenever a user enters or searches a query, search engines want to deliver the best and most relevant results. A strong SEO campaign includes various components, including web design, structure, and overall website functionality.
It’s really important to know and be aware of the potential pitfalls that could harm your ranking position so that you can either avoid them or at least identify them to implement appropriate solutions if they already affect the ranking.
11 Deadly Sins of Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
SEO is always a balancing trick to balance all the things in a way to rank on search engines. There are many crucial steps to consider while doing SEO. It’s not difficult for your SEO strategy to fall apart after exposure to any processing element. But, as a result, most SEO strategies are not as effective as they could be because of the pitfalls that lie in the strategy, also known as “the sins of SEO.”
These 11 sins of SEO are often difficult to detect, but they affect the website ranking in a way you can’t imagine at the time. They creep into the site when you least expect them, so I compiled and saved this list to avoid all those pitfalls when optimizing the site.
1. Only Feeding Search Engines:
In SEO, your visitor, or your customer, matters a lot. Many websites rank at the top with a copy or link for search engines. Countless pages contain content of what could be referred to as “SEO Copy” at the very bottom of the page. These websites are feeding the search engine for better ranking, and they don’t know it’s one of the deadly sins of SEO.
Your SEO activities should not only feed the search engines; they should also contain quality content relevant to the user’s needs and wants. If you undermine the quality of content, this will cause readers to not engage with your website, and your bounce rate will increase. Keep your focus on providing value to the people who visit your website and read your content by establishing SEO guidelines where it seems possible. Customer satisfaction is your ultimate priority and can also increase your search ranking and revenue.
2. Use of Duplicate Tags:
Most of us are not aware of this pitfall, as we use some duplicate tags in our content because they reflect the page content. Content is always different on each website page, and it should be. It would be best if you had different tags and a generic description tag on each page.
Your company may be the “best” in web development, digital marketing, and SEO services. But that is not what every page describes your services or products. Write your content according to the unique content of every page, as well as target the right keywords.
3. Ignore User Experience:
User experience, or UX, is how a user or a visitor interacts and engages with your website. It includes everything from the start of visual design and user interface to user ease and information architecture. If you ignore the user experience and fail to prioritize it, you can find yourself with a poor-design website that hurts your SEO efforts. This falls under the sin of search engine optimization.
The best way to understand how user experience affects SEO is to think back to the early days of the internet when people used search engines to find what they were looking for online. If a website was difficult to navigate and cluttered with dated design elements and poorly written content, it fell to the bottom of the rankings.
4. Not Consider SEO Before Developing Website:
The most important type of web traffic is organic search from relevant, targeted keywords. Make a proper SEO checklist before building a website. Search the related keywords, which can be added to the specific URLs, XML sitemaps, and HTML. And after the website is operational, doing this well and implementing more SEO strategies will make it more optimized and seamless.
According to the statistics report, 80% of consumers use search engines to shop. Moreover, 51% of traffic from B2B and B2C visitors comes from organic searches. It would be best if you considered SEO a priority, and one of the simple ways to do this successfully is by avoiding errors that could harm your ranking.
5. Use too many Links:
Google recommends only 100 links per webpage. If the limit is exceeded, this doesn’t mean that they will punish you for having more than 100 links per webpage. However, Google has some guidelines for what they consider to be the maximum number of links required to keep the content valuable and meaningful.
If the webpage is full of links, it can look itchy and unorganized to the visitors and be hard to read, and due to this, they’ll leave the site. This could enhance the bounce rate and drop the website’s ranking. Keep in mind that whenever a page includes an external link, that link draws a visitor away from your site, So understand the meaning of internal links and increase the number of internal links.
6. Building Doorway Pages:
Doorway pages are those that have been designed to rank well in search results but are not designed to provide an excellent experience to users. Doorway pages often contain hidden text and links that can manipulate the search engine algorithms and get you ranked higher than you should be, for instance. Avoid doorway pages to drive organic traffic and make your site content valuable for your audience.
7. Cloaking:
Cloaking is one of the deadly sins of SEO. When a website displays different content for different users, it is called “cloaking”. It is against Google Webmaster Guidelines, and it’s also a form of search engine optimization fraud. According to the law in some countries, cloaking can get you in trouble if your site is found to be taking misleading actions that distract the user in some ways.
8. Unattractive URLs:
While doing SEO, most underestimate the importance of a good URL. For search engines, visitors, and customers, URLs that seem easy to read and memorable are worth their weight in gold.
Dynamic page names are still in the line of not featuring the keyword in the URL; this is more of a rule than an exception. Now you’re thinking about Amazon and eBay; they don’t include keywords in their URLs and are still on the top of Google. Yes, it is possible to rank even without keywords in the URL. But if you include keywords in the URL, either the domain name or file names, this trick may give you an additional advantage over your competitors.
9. Avoid Analytics:
If you avoid analytics while doing SEO, all your SEO efforts will be for nothing. Many companies haven’t implemented analytics solutions on their website, and if they implemented a little bit, they didn’t do it in the right way. Here’s where questions arise: Does your analytics solution track the sales funnel properly? Do you know at what point you lose your prospects? If the answer is no, you should note your website’s analytics for better ranking.
To examine the analytics, a dedicated person or a team should be assigned to monitor your site, depending on its size. Analytics for a site includes an analytics solution along with other monitoring tools, such as Google Webmaster and Google Analytics.
10. Copy External Content:
Copying and pasting content from other websites relevant to your website may seem convenient. But it hurts your SEO in the long run. Search engines always prefer the relevant results to the queries, but they avoid showing the same information on the SERPs. So they filter the original content and rank it on the pages.
11. Set it, and then forget it:
It would be best if you kept in mind that SEO is not a one-and-done process. Many believe that once the site ranks on the search engine, there’s no need to do SEO again. But search algorithms change very often, and your site should change according to the new updates. Keywords change, and the new phrases may outpace the ones you initially targeted for your audience. Additionally, as your business strategy changes, the SEO optimization efforts on your website need to reflect these tactical updates.
Manage Your SEO:
In this digital era, your website is the main door to your business’s success. Managing or outsourcing SEO leads potential customers and buyers to access that door. Being thoughtful with your website’s content and focusing on keywords and links, whether external or internal, gives users the best experience and improves the website’s search engine ranking.
After knowing these 11 deadly sins of SEO, you can easily identify them and resolve them to create your SEO recipe. Problems and consequences with potential opportunities on your website can be identified and responded to according to a well-developed Search Engine Optimization strategy.
