There is lots of advice and information out there relating to SEO that tells you what you should do. However, it is every bit as important to know what you should not do in order to protect your rankings and your website.
One mistake with your SEO can literally mean the end of your website as far as Google is concerned with regards to ranking it. To help ensure it never happens to you, here are 3 mistakes you definitely want to avoid.
Publishing Sub-Standard Content
This still remains the number one mistake made by website owners. They spend their time focussing on backlinks, and the design of their website, and then post content that is useless at best, and damaging at worst.
Google places an extremely high premium on quality content, and so should you. It is the key to many things that affect your rankings, so do not be tempted into thinking you can get away with posting poor content.
Poor Onsite Navigation
Another common mistake is for website owners to invest a huge amount of time and energy trying to obtain backlinks from other websites but forgetting to set them up on their own website.
Internal linking done properly means that visitors to your website find it easier to navigate throughout it and are thus more likely to have a positive experience.
A positive experience means they might purchase from you, leave a positive review, or better still, recommend your website to others. It also means that they should spend longer on your website, which is an SEO signal picked up by Google.
Overloading Your Website With Media
Yes, we want quality content, but an error that is often made is when too much content is added to a website in the mistaken belief that Google will be impressed.
The fact is they will not be, especially when all the additional content like high-resolution images and large video files cause your website load speed to be negatively impacted.
Nor will your visitors be impressed when they land on your website only to be totally confused as to which piece of content they should be looking at.
