Sometimes the best way to learn something is by making mistakes. It’s one of those annoying truisms. You don’t learn the best level on your toaster until you’ve burnt the toast a few times. You can’t learn how to play violin without sounding horrible. In the same way, you can’t judge the right mix for search engine optimisation until you’ve made a few blunders.
Many SEO experts credit their mistakes as the reason they’re successful today. As some of those mistakes have led to their sites being removed from the index for a year, you can rest assured that they know what they’re talking about. Most business owners, however, can’t afford any mistakes when it comes to SEO. Happily, business owners can easily access the advice of these experts, saving a lot of trouble all around.
The absolute, all-time greatest mistakes of SEO
Picture a website. You’ve found it after randomly clicking to the very last result for your search query on Google. These are the reasons it’s sitting firmly in last place.
1. It takes ages to download. A swift download time is important, and not just for search engine optimization. Internet users hate having to wait for anything. If your site takes more than two seconds to load, you should worry.
Download times are taken into account in the calculation of rankings. They also count in SEO because every time a user clicks back to the search engine results pages (SERPs) you risk your popularity ranking going down. Talk to our experts at SEO Consult Australia about the download factor.
2. The design is hard to read. Internet users like information to be easy to access, and the search engines do, too. Web design can easily get in the way of clear communication. The colours of your page create an initial impression, but the layout of your page is even more important. Ensure that there is sufficient ‘breathing space’ around your content.
3. TMI: Too much information. Stuffing your pages with information will confuse visitor to your site and search engine spiders alike. Streamline information into obvious paths to ensure that your site users and the search engine spiders don’t get lost within the muck.
4. Trust issues. The trustworthiness of a site is weighing in even more heavily as time goes by. The search engines have a vested interest in listing reliable pages in their results. Internet users are also becoming more wary about downloading pages they can’t trust. You need to establish the trustworthiness of your site with on-page and off-page touches.
5. It features clunky content with clumsy keywords. This is the number one mistake made by websites when they first SEO. It doesn’t always get the site into trouble with the search engines, but it usually has a negative affect on site users. When content contains obvious keywords, it tells the user that their experience of the site is less important to the site owner than getting a good position in the SERPs. This subtle message can have a big effect.
