Most of the times, keywords are added without brainstorming to the web pages. This can lead to missing out on keywords that would result into increase in traffic. For beginners, it’s better to use Google keyword planner.
Apart from this, there are situations when web pages are overly loaded with keywords, thinking it will boost traffic to their site. When the web pages are stuffed with words or phrases, an important search engine optimization (SEO) point is overlooked i.e. content quality. A page having good quality content and limited keywords is ethical way to do SEO and also helps to improve search rankings. These kinds of practices are penalized by Google’s search result ranking algorithm.
Definition by Google- “Substantive blocks of content within or across domains which either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar is duplicate content”. Google focuses to show the visitors fresh content for a better user experience but some of the website tries to duplicate content deliberately to manipulate search engines in order to get more traffic and it further leads to poor user experience.
Sites having duplicate content have negative effect on their search ranking. Many a times, eCommerce sites or large sites do not realize that their sites may contain duplicate content. Use the rel=canonical tag for the pages that have same content.
The title tag describes the content or topic of the web page which is useful for both SEO and user experience as it briefly describes the page content to the user. While Meta descriptions provide the concise content explanations of web pages, it must be both persuasive and descriptive as possible. They are displayed as preview snippets for a given page on the search engine result pages (SERP’s). A good description can increase your CTR (click through rate.
Both of these form an essential part of the process for site optimization. Some common mistakes to avoid are:-
- Avoid duplicate Meta description and title tags. Instead go for the unique ones for each page.
- Avoid stuffing maximum keywords in both. Instead focus on quality of the content.
- Do not write long title and description. The length should be 60-70 characters long for the title and for description it must be around 160-170 characters.
4. Ignoring The Broken Link
If the visitor clicks on a link and it gets displayed as 404 page not found, it reflects a negative impact and gives a bad impression. In this way, one can even loose a lead. It also has negative impact on search engine ranking and Google may move the site down in the search result pages. The reason being that the site doesn’t exist or has mistype a URL or the page has been deleted. For improving the user experience and optimize the website for search engine, customize the 404 page and give options to the user to navigate to other pages of the site.
Internal linking is called when a word or text on a web page is linked to another page or resource within a website. Search engines use these links to crawl pages within a website. So websites lacking internal linking are missing the opportunity to boost their search ranking. Primary focus of site owners is on external linking thus missing out the merits of internal linking. Some of the merits of internal linking are:
- More pages of website are indexed by search engines.
- Helps the site owner to keep users stay on website longer and engage more with website.
6. Forgetting The Alt Tag
An alternative text tag or the alt tag is the text within website which is used to describe an image. These tags are used for search engines to learn about the image. So using it makes the search engine friendlier. Keywords can also be used as an alt tag text but do not overdo it. Use meaningful name for image optimization.
Source Url:- http://surevin.com/blog/common-seo-mistakes-which-affect-your-search-ranking/