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Website optimisation is one of the most important attributes of a content marketing strategy. While earlier most of the businesses did not pay attention to digital marketing, today businesses of all sizes and from different industries are using SEO to drive traffic and increase sales. However, not all businesses are aware of SEO best practices. Due to this, several businesses experience similar SEO pitfalls which result in loss of traffic and decreased sales.
As SEO techniques are evolving continuously, website owners or administrators need to change their perspectives and remain open towards adapting new SEO tactics and policies. To save your website from widely occurring SEO mistakes, here is a list of 10 most common pitfalls on the way to efficient SEO for your website.
1. Ignoring broken page links
One of the most common issues faced by a majority of websites is that of broken pages. Ignoring broken pages can be a critical issue if they have backlinks directing them through those web pages. A broken page is usually a link that points towards a page that does not exist. Whenever Google crawls a website, it starts from the root domain and further looks for any links. When the crawler finds a broken link, the page returns a 404 response code as there is no resource on the server that is present at that address. This results in the loss of time and resources of search engines and decreases the efficiency of the website.
2. Overlooking off-site SEO
Many businesses believe that SEO needs to be done only on-site. Although optimising the website is an important component of boosting its rank, you should not ignore off-site strategies. To enhance the performance of SEO, businesses must create engaging content for their personal as well as third-party websites. Thus, you must constantly use some SEO efforts to create keyword-rich content with links pointing at your website that can be placed on other websites.
3. Ignoring dated content
Constantly updating the website with fresh and relevant content is important to enhance its appeal for the new and existing audience. Constantly check your website for any outdated posts that are more than two years old. By regularly revising old posts, you can keep your website up-to-date with the latest content and also preserve your search engine ranking. To keep your content relevant and credible, you can start by refreshing evergreen content by removing all outdated information and updating it with the latest statistical information.
4. Unsatisfied search intent
Only writing useful content and not targeting it towards the right audience might not help your SEO technique work. Once you have found out your target audience, you must also take into account their search intent. As search intent is the intent of your audience behind their search, your content and website must satisfy it by providing an effective solution. Thus, you must understand what your audience are thinking when they search for products or services related to your business.
5. Unsolicited guest blogging
Even though guest blogging is a sustainable option for improving SEO, building author rank and increasing brand awareness, you must do guest blogging with caution. At the time of outlining your guest blogging plan check if you are not using any optimised anchors in your guest posts. Writing irrelevant or low-quality content might also reduce the quality of your guest posts.
6. Not optimising for mobile users
Today most of the website traffic comes from mobile devices. Whether you are a B2B or B2C business, a majority of your audience will use mobile devices to find your website. Businesses that fail to optimise their content for mobile users often lose a significant amount of traffic coming from mobile devices. By creating mobile-friendly content you can give your audience a seamless experience. While optimising your website for mobile devices, ensure that your website is responsive. Furthermore, focus on content that your audience intent to search for on a mobile device.
7. Ignoring image optimisation
The images on a website act as significant visual elements that are likely to have a positive impact on the user experience. Additionally, images also help search engines in finding a website and bringing it to the top of a search engine result pages. Thus, make sure to properly optimise your images by adding meta-description and URL. By choosing the relevant keywords, in the meta-description, image filenames and alt text, you can make increase the visibility of your website.
8. Building multiple links to the homepage
At the time of creating a link profile, analyse how many links are coming from trustworthy websites. Also, check the number of links directed to your homepage and other internal pages. Rather than building directing links to your homepage, try to build links that are directed to most of your internal pages. This will help you in improving your website rankings and will also take users directly to the page with the content they are looking for.
9. Allowing authority sites to republish your content
Many websites feel privileged when authority sites that are bigger than their website republish their content. This helps websites in getting a link back and also helps in generating more traffic and increasing sales. However, when content is republished, it creates duplicate content. Moreover, search engines like Google rank the authority site above the original website on a search engine result page. This increases the chances of websites getting penalised for content duplicity. To avoid any penalty, you can use a canonical tag that is pointed to your URL.
10. Using too many affiliate links
One of the most common ways of generating a steady income from websites is by using affiliate links. Even though affiliate links hold great marketing potential, it sometimes results in the drop of traffic. While including a few affiliate links in your website is not a cause of concern, stuffing it with too many affiliate links is not a good SEO practice. Moreover, having too many affiliate links also makes search engines feel that the main purpose of the website content is making affiliate sales. This could have a negative impact on the search engines and might decrease the rankings.
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She is an online Marketing Manager at PhD Centre, specialising in PhD thesis writing. She is passionate about researching and writing on various topics, including Education, Marketing, and Technology.
