Category: SEO

Search Engine Optimization is crucial to website ranking. Every business and website owner ensures to implement good SEO page practices to get more clicks and higher page ranking. SEO specialists are obsessed with getting more clicks and organic visitors which is why they take the time to create honest and valuable content. If you keep doing the same thing, you’ll definitely get the same output. The question is, are you doing the right thing? There is no escaping good SEO if you aim to rank your website higher on search engines. These techniques are geared toward propelling your website to the top of search engines. Have you tried ranking your websites and it seems not to be working? Perhaps, you’re using bad SEO practices that you probably aren’t aware of. Many website owners get undesirable results because they implement the wrong SEO practices. Avoid these practices. In this article, I will share sixteen bad SEO practices. 1. Not connecting with Google or Bing Google and Bing are the two most popular search engines in the world. As such, not connecting your website with these search engine giants can affect your SEO score. To avoid this, you want to take out time to set up Google Analytics, Google Search Console as well as Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Tag Manager for your website. It can be difficult for beginners but amazingly, there are tools to make your work easier. 2. Publishing plagiarized content This is an obvious bad practice that many website owners trivialize. Search engines hate plagiarized or duplicated content, whether it is duplicating someone else’s content or your own content. Publishing plagiarized content is one of the worst SEO practices that will get your website penalized by search engines. You want to play by the rules by investing efforts in writing new content or hiring a freelance writer to compose high-quality SEO articles for your website. If you are not posting unique and original content for each page of your site, Google isn’t going to trust you. 3. Ticking a “noindex” box Many WordPress website developers ignorantly tick the “noindex” box and don’t know why. Some forget to untick the box after ticking it during website maintenance. Doing this discourages search engines from indexing your site. If you want your WordPress site to gain visibility on search engines, you need to untick the “noindex” box. 4. Not submitting sitemap XML An XML sitemap helps Google prioritize which web pages to crawl and when. Submitting an XML sitemap offers a lot of benefits, including a higher ranking. If you don’t know how to create an XML sitemap, install the Yoast SEO plugin to get help. 5. Neglecting image alt tags Search engine spiders don’t see the way humans see. This is because they are a set of programs. We see images by observing the color, brightness, background, etc. but search engine spiders read images by scanning through their alt tag. A lot of folks neglect adding image alt tags and end up missing a large chunk of traffic. 6. Lazy naming of images Still on images, not renaming images is a bad SEO practice. Before uploading a picture on your website, ensure to rename it to describe what the picture is about. It is unprofessional to upload “234DCURH.JPG” for a Black Nike Air Max sneaker. Rather, name the product or image to mirror what it describes, for example, “black-nike-air-max.jpg”. Also remember to add appropriate ALT text so that when the page fails to load images due to poor Internet connection, the image tag will appear. 7. Misleading headlines Writing catchy headlines is good, but you must avoid misleading headlines. I know you want traffic, but don’t overhype content just to get clicks. Google and other search engines will dust this page under the carpet because it misleads the readers. How can you title your article “Top 10 Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Businesses” and when someone clicks on the link all the post talks about is really how to make money online selling online. 8. Not installing an SEO plugin Plugins are developed to make life easier for website designers. Trivializing the impacts of plugins can affect your SEO. I know you are an SEO expert, but you can achieve more with SEO plugins. They make your work faster and more effective with minimal effort. Try installing Rank Maths or Yoast SEO. 9. Using too many internal links Internal links are essential for ranking a website, but should not be too much. It is better to skip internal links than to have spammy ones. This is a bad SEO practice that should be avoided. Instead of flooding your posts with internal links, link only relevant pages and leave the rest. You also want to avoid broken links or links with misleading or inappropriate anchor texts. 10. Not addressing taxonomies When creating a blog post, several factors need to be considered - some of which are the title, tags, and categories. Let’s say you created a blog post titled “The Rich Lazy Student”. Placing this post in the “Lazy Student” category and “Lazy Student” tag can lead to cannibalizing or duplicating effect. The effect is that the category URL and the tag URL will be showing the same article which is unhealthy. A good SEO practice would be to optimize them effectively. 11. Buying links I know there are a lot of website owners or SEO specialist who thinks buying links is a smart way of generating traffic. In case you don’t know, Google frowns at webmasters paying for links. Your website links are supposed to be unique, containing rich, relevant, and valuable content to attract readers. Buying links is likened to buying your way to the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) which violates Google’s terms and conditions. Website owners found violating this will get penalized by Google. 12. Stuffing your Meta keywords Stuffing Meta keywords is an obsolete way of boosting your rankings. Google’s Algorithm has changed over the years, so stop wasting stuffing keywords and Meta. 13. Putting your blog on a subdomain Another bad SEO page practice is putting your blog on a sub domain like blog.lekanzee.com. Doing this only weakens your blog’s authority and trust. Even if you intend to build authority and trust for this subdomain separately, it’ll be a waste of time. Your best shot should be using the default setting, which is a subfolder - for example, www.lekanzee.com/blog. 14. Cloaking Cloaking simply refers to deliberately showing one type of content to your human visitors and another to the search crawlers. Webmasters use cloaking when trying to hide something from search crawlers (like spammy links, ads, or computer-generated content). You want to avoid this bad SEO practice entirely. 15. Homepage title keyword stuffing While the homepage is the best spot to showcase your brand name and Slogan, do not use it as an opportunity to repeat a set of variations of keywords. That is called homepage keyword stuffing, and it is a bad SEO practice. 16. Blocking .js and .css file in robots.txt Lastly on this list, blocking your JavaScript or CSS file in robots.txt may not be a good idea. It limits Google from crawling your site properly and effectively. WRAPPING UP Ranking your page on search engines isn’t a short-term endeavor. It takes time, but the beauty is that the long-term costs outweigh any potential immediate gains. As an SEO specialist, you need to keep up with updates on Google’s algorithm - it happens frequently. Trying to outsmart the system will prove costly for your website or your client, as the case may be. Make sure your SEO strategy comprises honest and updated practices. Now that you have an idea of the 16 bad SEO practices on the web, I guess it is time to review your strategies and apply some of those best practices to grow your site. Shout out to us in the comment section below; we’d love to help you make your SEO strategy even better than it already is. Meanwhile, check out other SEO posts.

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