SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2019

Good website SEO is any marketer’s most valued possession.

Being one of the best ways of generating qualified leads, unique website visitors and growing a business’ online presence, SEO beats all other mediums of driving web traffic.

In 2018, around 2 trillion Google searches took place every day.

This explains the whole hype about SEO. There are billions of people making trillions of web searches everyday. A sea full of opportunities.

But how to bite on these?

Google considers around 70 on page factors while positioning a web page in its SERPs.

While good on-page SEO brings-in results, lacking the same will cost you valuable visitors.

All in all, on page SEO is crucial and can be tricky at times. That’s why there are some general mistakes which occur a little too often.

In this article we’ll talk about those mistakes and focus on solutions.

Here are the most common On-page SEO mistakes that can cost you valuable traffic.

On Page SEO Mistakes That Might Be Killing Your Traffic Growth

 

1. Poor Web Design

You might have hired the greatest of the designers and thought of building up one of the most aesthetic websites ever, provided everything, it still might not be the best design.

How?

SEO doesn’t plainly work upon aesthetics. Search engines consider users’ response to overall usability of your website, but aesthetics alone can’t win you the deal.

Having said that, a questions comes up.

What in web design works for SEO if aesthetics don’t?

Referring to that, I have a checklist for you.

• Accessibility: Starting with how easy your website is for a user to access, it comes to being easy for search spiders as well.This goes straight into better indexing.
• Navigation: Website navigation is one of the most important factors to decide user experience.While a navigation menu is not the best thing to use on a landing page, you must ensure that all the other pages on your website have a properly sorted navigation menu.
• A website lacking a navigation menu is more prone to make the users lose their way.

  Apart from enhancing user experience, a good navigation menu will allow your users access to more of your content. Result? More page views. Simple!

• Layout: A good website layout is vital for keeping your users engaged on the website.

  You might be creating great content and doing everything that matters. If your website’s layout is crummy, you’ll have a real hard time retaining users and keeping them from bouncing.

  And we all know what impact a high bounce rate leaves on the search rankings.

Most search engines take high bounce rate as a negative ranking factor

To safeguard your website from this, what you need to do is focus on building a website which holds the users for a longer span of time.

The key to doing that is creating great, in-depth content and coming up with a subtle web design which is simple yet efficient.

 

2. Slow Loading Website

Your website’s SEO depends highly on its loading speed.

The initial days of internet and internet marketing might have seen and let grow even slow loading websites, as the competition is on a constant rise and Google is updating, this has come to an end.

Great websites in 2018 load at the speed of light. (not literally, ugh!)

Three seconds. Two seconds. One second. It’s always getting better.

Users dig website speed. And as they react more positively towards fast loading websites, search engines observe this and take website speed in consideration while laying the SERPs.

Apart from that, search engine crawlers find it really easy to crawl across pages which load fast.

A website which takes forever to load will never be fully crawled and indexed by the search engines. Reason? It takes too long to load up and be crawled.

But how to make it right for your site?

The first step involves you to take a website speed test.

Go to Google Pagespeed Insights or GTMetrix.com. Place your website’s url in the bar and hit enter.

A page displaying your website’s pagespeed insights will load up.

This is a kind of a report card for your site’s speed. On this page you will see all the existing issues regarding your website’s speed.

What you need to do next is pick these issues one-by-one and resolve them to improve your website speed.

3. Thin or Copied Content

When the concept and practice of SEO was new to the masses, the search engines also were not that smart.

I remember how in 2010 a web page with keyword stuffed thin content, providing little to no information would reach the first page of Google SERPs.

Marketers used this to ‘mint crocks of gold’. This was something which always used to work.

But then, search engines started working up their algorithms.

While earlier, keyword density used to majorly affect search rankings, now the algorithms have turned to prioritizing overall content quality over just keywords.

This means that any website with thin or copied or keyword stuffed content will be turned down by the search engines.

So, what’s your best bet against this?

Focus on creating content which actually helps your readers. Also ensure that no content on your site is copied. Copied content invites more trouble than we think. Worst of all, it can get you hit by a copyright infringement legal suite.

For further understanding about creating good content, keep these tips in mind.

• Clarity of words: Before your content needs to be anything, it has to be clear with words.Don’t try to insinuate too much. Don’t try to ask the reader to assume stuff about your content. And also, try to avoid any chances of causing any sort of ambiguity with your content.This is how you keep your content simple.
• Keep it concise: The key to creating persuasive content is conciseness.While hundreds of printed pages in a novel might appeal its readers, when you try to make a sale you need to be concise.The reason why people use internet for information is because it makes things easy.

  If they have to figure stuff out or think a lot even after reading from a website, then what’s the point of reading from that website?

  It’d be better to read from a place where content is more concise and informative at the same time, right?

  Well, now as you know, take action on this.

  Go through your content. Find the spots where you can shorten sentences. Remove errors, if any. Work on the crispness. And you’ll be good to go.

• Create compelling content: Compellability is another characteristic your content must have.You yourselves too would have come across some persuasive content pieces. 

  Don’t you just love the way they work?

  Driving the potential consumer down the conversion funnel, like a pro. That’s where you have to be.

  So, focus on that. Create content which makes sense with every word.

  Before asking the readers to sign up, provide them quality content. Let them know that your website and you want to help them.

  Then pay attention to the language that you use while writing. The way you speak to the readers can make or break the compellability of your content.

You can also consider focusing on visual content. Web pages having visual content perform better than the ones without.

 

4. Irrelevant Outbound Links

While relevant outbound linking is crucial, adding too many or irrelevant outbound links can adversely harm your site’s SEO. This happens as a result of link juice being greatly distributed among the sites that you are linking to.

But then, how much is too much?

No search engine has ever made a mention of the exact acceptable number of outbound links on a webpage.

What we know is that more than quantity, relevance matters.

Studies have proven that adding even 7-8 outbound links per webpage won’t harm, if those are adding any value to the content.

While the statement above holds a strong ground, most webpages have 3-4 outbound links at the highest. And talking about the rightfulness and wrongfulness, both the practices work fine as long as link relevancy is maintained.

Also, note that too many do-follow outbound links will result in a leak in the page rank.

 

5. Inadequate Interlinking

As it is important to keep a check on the outbound links, internal linking matters too.

Proper interlinking of content helps in lowering bounce rates; resulting more page views.

Apart from search algorithms considering interlinking directly as a ranking factor, this reduced bounce rate also sends out a positive message to the search engines.

This helps in boosting search rankings.

But how to know if the interlinking of content on your website is proper?

Maybe these internal linking tips can help you with that.

• Link to relevant content. Let us assume you are writing an article about how to create great landing pages.Now in that content you might talk about a few considerable design elements as well.Here, you would know if the website which you are writing that post for has an article about landing page design elements. And if there is, what you should do is link to that article.

  This is how you pick the right content to link to. Don’t add links just for the sake of adding a link. It harms more than it benefits.

  Keep it simple. Link only when it is totally making sense and adding value to the content piece that you are writing.

• Avoid linking to ‘Contact us’ and home page of your website.‘What? Really? Why? And how to get users to see our homepage or contact us then?’Think for yourself, you know the answer to that.

  You just wrote a brilliant piece of content and added home page or contact us page link to it. What you could do instead was mention a contact detail like an email address here.

  And talking about home page, it would be better to push your readers to some other relevant article instead of sending them to the homepage.

  Also, to answer why this is required, internal or backlinks from some other website, all links build authority.

  While you can use interlinking to boost authority on some important pages on your site, linking to the home page and contact us page won’t get you anywhere.

  It’ll just result in a wasted flow of link juice.

• Keep your internal links follow. Any backlink ever built falls under one of the two categories.Do-follow and no-follow.Moving on to what these mean, do-follow links are followed (considered) by search engine crawlers while placing a webpage in the SERPs. And no-follow links? Well. they don’t make a considerable impact on the search rankings.

  So, what I’m saying is keep all of your internal links do-follow. Also, if you’d like an in-depth study about internal linking, here is an awesome interlinking guide.

 

6. Broken Links

Digital marketers across the world have been speaking of ill-effects of broken links on SEO.

But you might want to know how exactly do these links affect SEO?

I have words to say here.

What impression would you have about a business which’s store is not taken care of? What would you think about a store which is always out of stock or suffers from the same issue every time you visit them?

The first conclusion that your mind comes to might be that the business owners are not concerned enough about the business.

Result? You would think twice before dealing with such a business.

Same goes with broken links on your website.

Finding such links, any search engine and user will get a chance to think negative about your business. This impression will be reflected in your site’s search rankings.

 

7. Too Many Ads

Another killer for SEO is the ‘plethora of ad codes’ on a webpage.

While Ads are the main revenue source for most of the websites, using too many ad codes turns both search engines and users off.

But does it technically affect that much?

Yes. For better understanding, here are the ways in which too many ads can hamper SEO.

• Pages become heavy. The second point that I mentioned in this article was negligence of page speed.This is one common mistake that has been killing websites’ SEO plans for long.Then adding too many ads on a page simply makes it heavy. A huge load of complex codes, images and even animations. This is what ads are generally composed of.

  While every single ad added on a webpage hinders loading speed, having too many ads on a single page will result in really slow loading times. And then this will directly result in poor search rankings.

• Search spiders have a tough time crawling pages with too many ads.It’s simple. A search crawler’s job is to crawl through the whole webpage’s code.Too many ads mean a really bulky code. This directly makes crawling a ruckus which search spiders might not feel like indulging in.

  This will result in delayed page rendering. Delayed page indexing. And poor search rankings.

  So, choose the number and type of ads you place on your site wisely.

Final words

A website’s search rankings and organic traffic depend on a huge lot of factors.

Some of these are off-page factors. Some are site-level factors. And some are on-page SEO factors.

Talking of where to begin, any website’s SEO journey starts with improvising on-page factors.

As mentioned in the first section, Google takes seventy on-page factors in consideration for a website’s SEO. This means that there is a lot you need to improve when your site’s SEO is concerned.

But what are the most important of these on-page factors? The factors which your site can’t do without? Factors neglecting which will be a mistake your site can’t afford?

In this article we tried to talk about those factors only. This was about the On Page SEO mistakes that might be costing you valuable visitors.