Have you ever wondered the reason behind your blog isn’t shown on search engine results pages? Whether you are a blogger or owner of a website, you expect the results that can come out with the highest conversion along with a high return on investment. For this, you have to optimize your websites for search engines. Generally, Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing website on-page elements, technical elements as well as page parts.
If you are new to SEO, you may fall into the wrong practices. This may harm your websites in a way, you won’t imagine and actually give the worst results. Here are 10 Mistakes that can hurt your websites and they are listed below:-
#1 Stuffing Keyword
Keywords are the main part of SEO, but over-optimizing keywords may harm your ranking by google itself. As per the Google algorithm, only 1.5% of the focus keywords and 0.5% of the LSI (latent semantic intent) keywords should be used on the particular article. It may be counted as good SEO optimized content and have a chance of a good ranking position on search engine result pages.
Stuffing keywords is not only about using similar keywords repeatedly but also including content that can be out of context or out of topic. Every visitor wants to have relevant information and knowledge, they rarely read the information that is irrelevant and the topics that are not fit them. Besides this, Google does not want to index the content full of keyword stuffing.
Google always tries to find out unique content, plagiarism free with a proper subheading. So you must write content without stuffing keywords, it may help you index and crawl faster. Optimizing according to guidelines of google results in ranking faster.
#2 Not Creating Sitemaps
One of the reasons, why your blog posts do not get ranking on Google is not generating sitemaps. This may be a big mistake for any blogger and webmaster. Sitemaps is basically an XML file that is designed to learn about website structure or it is the file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files. Search engines like google read this file to more intelligently crawl your sites.
Many websites lack creating sitemaps, but if there is a problem in crawling and indexing websites, then a sitemap helps search engines like google to find out the number of live pages that return status code 200, which results in quick indexing and ranking. you can easily generate sitemaps through Yoast SEO plugins.
If you face an indexing problem, then you can go google search console or google webmaster tools and submit that sitemap file. Quick indexing and crawling of websites can be easily solved by generating sitemaps. But the best practice is not to include those below URL
#3. Not Understanding How Search Engine Works
There are different types of search engines like google, bing, yahoo, Yandex, etc. Among these, Google is the most popular and used search engine. 70 % of users are using google for any query and information, but no one has an idea about how exactly google works?. Google works on the basis of three steps i.e Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking.
Crawling basically means when you publish a post, google gets notified about your post and they start crawling and scanning your website content after that if your article is good enough to index, then google indexes those content and stores it in the database so that whenever any query came, google easily show those relevant content to the visitors.
Lastly, after indexing google ranks those pages that might be at 1st, 2nd and 3rd position. Being aware of such a working process of google can lead to publishing unique and fresh articles. So, before publishing any article, you must go through google guidelines and algorithms for great results.
#4. Not Noticing The Bounce Rate Of Webpages
Similarly, the Bounce rate is also a part of SEO. This is considered as the percentage of visitors that leaves web pages without taking an action or clicking on internal links and other technologies like chatbots. Bounce rate is the element of google analytics where you can see the rate of web pages. Many SEOs are not aware of this but optimizing or improving the bounce rate of ant websites converts into great results.
You can optimize with on-page elements or off-page. The reason bounce rate increase is, due to very slow page speed, bad user experiences, unnecessary pop-up ads, bad visibility of websites, etc, these experiences of visitors can lead to an increased bounce rate. According to a report on GoRocketFuel.com, the average Bounce Rate range is between 41 and 51%. If this data exceeds more than 55%, then you need to improve the bounce rate of your pages. Tips to improve your bounce rate:-
- Embed youtube videos on your pages
- Split a long paragraph into a short paragraph
- Improve Page Speed
- Compress Big Size images
- Use a fast hosting provider
- Remove unused plugins and comments
#5. Lack Of Off-Page Activities
Backlinks are considered one of the ranking signals by Google itself. People only think creating backlinks in bulk with old practices works, but this is totally wrong. Buying links in bulk does not go to workout properly. You have to choose the right site according to your website niche. Similarly, you can check Domain Authority, Page Authority, Spam Score, and the number of unique visitors per month also you can check out the domain age of websites.
With this type of quality score, you need to approach some other websites for backlinks. Google doesn’t consider irrelevant websites for backlinks, making quality backlinks is much more than quantity backlinks. Types of off-page techniques, you can include are;
- Article Directories
- Guest posting
- Social bookmarking
- Image sharing
- Pdf sharing
- Social bookmarking
- Press release
- Classified submission
Related Article:- Top 10 Digital marketing strategies for online clothing brand
#6. Not Knowing The Difference Between HTTP And HTTPS
Actually, People don’t know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS, and that’s the problem. Search engines like google see HTTP and HTTPS as two different websites with identical content. This leads to duplicate content and websites and google may confuse which site to index and prioritize on search engine result pages. Due to this reason, your ranking of websites gradually goes down.
From another definition, having only HTTP doesn’t make your website secure and responsive. You must transfer your site from HTTP to HTTPS. If any user visits your site, and then your website responds as not secure then that can lead to an increased bounce rate and taking less action on your site.
Having SSL on your websites can lead to more traffic and trust. if not, Google also ignores this kind of website as a nonsecure. If your website has options of paying internationally, then https is the most recommended version for your site.
#7 Not Fixing Broken Links Properly
A broken page is a webpage that can’ be accessed or found by a user. These are the 404 error pages on your websites. when the pages are already removed but it’s still on the search results and the webserver often sends an error message when a user tries to access this type of page. The reason is, that 404 pages can damage your visitor’s browsing experience.
You may lose a good amount of traffic to your site due to broken pages. We all want to stay on those pages, that have accurate information and a good user experience. Same for many visitors, they want to see the answer, they are searching for. So to resolve this error, you must remove the broken links from the affected pages or replace them with links to other live pages.
Example Of Broken Links:-
- 404 page not found: Page that doesn’t exist on the server
- 400 bad request: server cannot understand the URL
- 401: unauthorized URL
- Reset: the host server drops connections. It is either misconfigured or too busy.
#8 Not Using Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is all about appearing the same content in more than one place. Talking about duplicates, you can assume the same content on different internal pages of the same websites. Google may confuse with this type of duplicate content while crawling. Technically, duplicate content can actually impact rankings negatively.
According to the penguin algorithm of google, websites must have unique content that is plagiarism-free. Having duplicate content on your websites may confuse google, which is original, and duplicate pages and that may result in indexing issues. In general, Google doesn’t want to rank websites that have duplicate content.
#9 Ignoring Schema Markup
According to Mozbar, Schema is considered a high-ranking factor of search engines. Schema Markup is an organized format to give complete information about a page. It assists web indexes with enjoying Google to comprehend the substance of the page and accumulate data to further improve your business listing on google search engine result pages. It is coded straightforwardly to the page’s HTML markup.
Google utilizes this organized information and produces rich snippets. These are little snippets of data that show up in a query. It is essentially the additional data furnished alongside the primary data. There are different types of schema that can be added on WordPress like product schema, FAQ Schema, organization schema, local schema event page, video page, etc.
Likewise, if you go and write any keywords on google search engine result pages, of course, your eyes will go on results that have a rating, reviews, and price. Your webpages complete information can be shown on google using schema markup. Hypeyeti gives all of these services that can make your website rank higher on search results.
#10 Failed To Promote On Google My Business
If you are in the SEO field and you haven’t listed your websites on google my business, then you are way more behind ranking on google. Google my business is free to use and it’s the best way to optimize your websites locally. Simply, you can fill up all the requirements given by google business.
Building up websites and not promoting on google my business can lead to having a website but not optimizing with content and proper images. It helps to engage with customers more often and helps to visualize your business on search engine results pages. Hype yeti marketing Pvt Ltd is a well-known digital marketing agency based in Kathmandu, Nepal that has helped numerous businesses in growing their online presence.
Also Read:- A complete guide on social media marketing in Nepal
