In today’s digital world, search engine optimization (SEO) has become a crucial aspect of online marketing. Whether you’re running a small business or a large corporation, having a strong SEO strategy can make all the difference in attracting visitors to your website and boosting your online presence. With so much competition online, it’s essential to understand how SEO works and how to optimize your website for search engines.
While the internet is packed with advice on getting the most out of your SEO, it isn’t always advice that will make your SEO successful. If you need help figuring out where to start, here are five things to avoid in SEO.
Having a slow website
If it takes longer than 2 seconds to load your website, Google will rank it lower. When your site takes too long to load, it will hurt the overall user experience and could affect your rank in Google searches. Since Google cares about providing the most accurate information to users in a short period of time, they will not think twice about lowering your search result if your website loads slowly. Google also uses a metric called Core Web Vitals, which emphasizes user experience- and users want everything to load quickly.
Having no metadata
Did you know you can tell search engines what information to show in the search results? If you do not have metadata, your search results could be worse than a competitor that does. When you do not tell Google what you want it to display, search engines will populate the fields based on your website content, which may not be the best. Sentences could be incomplete, and there could be better information than what the search engine decides to pull for you.
Blocking search engines
While real people don’t have time to search the internet for sites with accurate information, site crawlers do. Ensure that these crawlers are not purposefully (or accidentally) blocked from your site. Common fields to check are the robots.txt field and the ‘no index field.’ The first of these fields is where Googlebot could be accidentally blocked from being able to crawl, and the second could cause a single page or your entire website to be hidden. If your website is not indexing properly, it could be hard for people to find you.
Having no internal links
Search engines do not like sites without internal links because they find them harder to understand and less organized. Internal links not only make a site easier to navigate and more user-friendly, but they also help search engines index your content. Internal linking is an essential aspect of SEO that can significantly impact your website’s search engine rankings, and without them, your website will likely rank lower.
Never updating SEO
Just as design trends change over time, so do search engine algorithms. When you succeed in ranking well for one set of keywords, that’s just the start; you have to keep working at it if your goal is continued success. Long-term commitment to SEO is necessary to maintain that ranking, and there are always new techniques you can use as part of ongoing efforts. Be sure to look for new opportunities to benefit your business- think of SEO as a competition. There will always be a competitor looking to take the top spot. If your SEO is outdated, they could easily take your place.
