Building a site from scratch requires a thoughtful strategy about everything: the site architecture, designing and visuals, the content that goes onto it, the SEO efforts, and everything else. With so much hard work and domain expertise exercised towards the development of a website, it is a tragedy to see them not take off as expected. Even with the right intentions to keep all the website development blocks in the right places, webmasters often jeopardize their websites due to some mistakes on their part. Talking of these mistakes, we know how important our site’s search engine optimization (SEO) is.
However, some errors lead to the downfall of the intended and hamper our SEO efforts. It is imperative to stay aware of these mistakes, especially if you are new to the world of web development and SEO.
Making sure that these errors don’t take place not only helps enhances the overall website performance but also leads to exemplary user experience for the site visitors.
So, here are some of the most common website errors that hamper your SEO efforts.
A slow-loading website
If you are new to the whole website development thing and are solely focused on creating a great website that is visually appealing and has relevant content on it, you might be missing one very important factor to consider: the website loading speed.
Did you know that the desirable loading speed of a webpage ranges up to 3 seconds? And if your site is missing on this benchmark, your site visitors will be forced to abandon your site and look for alternatives i.e., your competition.
Websites that are heavy on the design perspective often are the slowest to load, if not optimized. Also, keep an eye on your blog as well because it might also get slower due to the use of images and videos.
Plaigirised website content
Creating a website is fairly a simple process these days, given the ease of implementation offered by many Content Management Systems (CMS) out there, such as WordPress. Also, with the sheer obsession of people with affiliate marketing, everyone now suddenly wants to start their own website and make money. This is where inexperienced or crafty website owners resort to copying content from other websites and use it as their own, committing plagiarism.
Content shortcuts such as plagiarism sabotage your SEO. So, refrain from doing so or choosing content writers who offer to practice such strategies. It is fine to be inspired by other’s content for blog suggestions. However, it is a fair practice to create one’s original and high-quality content, which promises to stay helpful for your target audience.
A website with too many pages
There are over 1.5 billion websites on the world wide web today. With such humongous competition to tackle, all webmasters try to do their unique bits in order to stand out. This is where the site designing is an essential factor. However, in an attempt to create a visually unique website, webmasters often end up adding too many pages to their website, creating an overall heavy website.
A website with too many pages not only burdens your web server but can also be a frustrating experience for your site visitors.
People don’t want to commit to a single website viewership these days because of the overall lack of attention span. So, do your audience a favor and ditch high-design websites that come with too many pages because they will be slow loading and will experience a very high bounce rate.
Overstuffed keywords
At some point in our lives, we all were newbies struggling to figure out what makes or break the site’s SEO machinery. A very common mistake made by all SEO newbies who are attempting keyword for their site is the practice of overstuffing keywords into the content pieces. Without realizing the damage inflicted on the website, people blindly go about practicing this strategy and ultimately murder their site’s SEO plan.
This is why Keyword density needs to be worked with.
Simply put, the Keyword density is the percentage value of the number of times a keyword is used on a web page compared to the total number of keywords on the page. As per the experts, the ideal keyword density for a good content piece is 1-2%. So, it is a great idea to operate in this estimate and not indulge in overstuffing.
No image optimization in place
We absolutely love this one because this is such a common SEO hampering mistake made by many of us. The right thing to do when it comes to creating a stunning piece of content is to choose a set of high-resolution images. However, in an attempt to make our websites visually appealing, we often overuse images that end up consuming a lot of bandwidth.
With no image optimization in place, these websites become slow to load, and the SEO efforts take a dive. Finding the right image and preparing them for use in your blogs/articles might sound like a very simple task, but it indeed requires some effort. Right from choosing the appropriate image format, scaling it for image SEO, reducing its file size to adding Alt text for further optimization, you must take care of all the steps so that your images serve the purpose of strengthening your SEO moves.
Broken links and pages
Have you ever tried accessing a webpage, and it displayed a 404 error? Well, that’s frustrating and kills the user-experience. In a similar manner, if your website fails to take care of broken links or pages, it’s SEO performance might go downhill and end up affecting your site’s reputation. By using tools like Broken Link Checker, webmasters can ensure that no such links exist on their website and that their link profile is robust enough to get that link juice. With a regular site audit, you should be able to locate any broken pages and fix them as well.
An unresponsive website
Is your website not mobile-friendly yet? Well, that’s a bummer. An unresponsive or mobile-unfriendly website isn’t much favored by the search engines. Such websites see a drop in overall traffic and organic visits because a lot of website surfers access the web from their mobile devices.
So, if you do not want to miss out on that piece of the cake, make sure that your website is well-optimized for viewing on all mobile devices.
Conclusion
Inexperienced website owners are work-in-progress. It is with hit-and-trial methods that people eventually figure out the right thing to do. However, in this highly competitive world of websites, it is an added advantage to stay informed about the obvious mistakes and hence, gain an overall edge over the competition by creating a great website that works well and delivers on its promises.