Worst Rank-Destroying SEO Mistakes

World of SEO is full of do-it-yourself experts, who only have a very basic grasp of what actually goes into a potentially successful campaign. If you believe that you belong to this category, you should know about some common, and potentially, very serious mistakes that are easy to avoid, but that could otherwise lead not only to all of your effort being completely futile, but actually cause the site that you are working on to be deindexed.

Choosing Inadequate Hosting

Naturally, if you intend on working on an already existing website, the owner may not be willing to change their hosting, but if you are considering optimizing a website that hasn’t been built yet, you should carefully consider your hosting options.

The provider has to be able to offer support for all the scripts and tools that your site will need, as well as afford you with enough resources so that the site doesn’t freeze as soon as your traffic spikes for the first time. Likewise, you need to make sure that you are not in a bad neighborhood, which is to say that your provider is not hosting spammy sites, as that might label you as a spammer as well.

Using Restricted Techniques

You have probably heard about three approaches to SEO – White, Gray and Black hat. Black Hat is the worst possible resort when it comes to Google-approved practices, it is considered to be unethical and because of these wrongful methods your website might easily get deindexed. This means strict avoidance of keyword stuffing, site scraping, cloaking, and others.

White Hat is completely different aspect of increasing your website’s visibility; it is the key to effective SEO. It allows keeping the integrity of the website while still existing within the frame of search engine’s terms of service. Provide great content made especially for the readers – not for the sake of links, find a solid keyword phrase that precisely represents your webpage, make your way to inbound linking and pay attention to page elements – visually break up your page with SEO-appropriate headings. If your methods do not comply with White Hat postulates – none of the SEO techniques are effective.

Not Doing Your Onsite Properly

A lot of people who are new to SEO focus on off page factors, like building the link portfolio and reaching out to people on different social networks. While these are important parts of an SEO strategy, you should only start dealing with them once you have a solid base, which is to say a site with decent onsite. This includes a number of things, like making sure that your page titles contain the keywords that you want to rank for; that you have optimized your internal linking structure for the best effect; that your page loading times are as low as possible; that you have an XML sitemap to help out the crawlers; that your bounce rate is at its minimum, as well as a number of other things.

Duplicated Pages

While it is sometimes impossible not to have several versions of a page, you should at least try to designate the canonical one, marking it as the one that crawlers should pay attention to. While having several versions of a same page is admissible in some instances, you should always be careful not to let this happen with your home page, as that could lead to significant loss of link value.

A little bit of planning goes a long way. Every bit of the effort you invest in preserving your good rankings is worth your time because it most definitely delivers great results.

Author Bio:

Leana Thorne is a devoted blogger and a regular contributor to several tech blogs. She enjoys sharing newly found information, and loves writing –currently is exploring ways of organic search engine optimization, and is always happy to be of help.