SEO Failures That Could Ruin Your Search Ranking

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is as important for your website, as the diesel in your vehicle. It can take you on a long journey, where plenty of career opportunities are waiting for you in the queue. But wait, while driving one needs to wear the seat belt or else it may increase your chances of getting crashed, similarly while doing the SEO, you have to be very careful about your choices of strategies or else, it turns into a disaster. That’s no surprise, there are dozens of problems one needs to tackle to reach the heights, they have ever thought of, which is easier said than done. To minimize your loss, here are some failures you need to keep yourself away from. So, let’s take a look at them.

Duplicate Content: Do you know, to attain the highest position on the search engines you need to keep the Google happy and satisfied? And it is only possible if you follow all its algorithms. If you know this, so, you are also aware of the fact that Google is in deep love with the unique content. And if you are serving it the duplicate content in the name of unique only, it’ll break his heart and put a drastic impact on your search ranking. So, focus on flourishing the magic of words that win the heart of the search engines and turn the table positively.
No Title Tag And Description: You can’t explain yourself to anyone without giving proper introduction – can you? For sure, your answer would be “No” – isn’t? So, how could you expect this from Google? It’s a robot and you have to understand your words to them, which is possible by adding a title tag and description.
Broken URLs: Broken links broke the website ranking, therefore, it is more than just compulsory for you to check and rectify them shortly. If you want to attract Google to your website to level up its ranking, you should pay proper attention to the same.
Loading Speed: If your website takes too long to load, so, it’ll slide the customers away from your company, therefore, it is compulsory for you to enhance its speed as soon as possible. It is an important parameter that one needs to pay special attention to; otherwise, it’ll break your image in the market.
These were a few things that you need to rectify to attain the top position on the Google’s very first page. There are many other things and you can hire an SEO Company to sort them out.

SEO Tips to Boost Rankings in the Era of Mobile-First Index

The rise in the number of smartphone users has made mobile the new normal. Realising this, Google rolled out its mobile-first index, giving mobile versions of websites an upper hand when it comes to ranking. So, marketers must focus on mobile more than ever. If you need help optimising your website for search engines in the mobile era, keep reading.

Create a Responsive Website Design

In order to rank well, responsive website design is the most critical change that you need to make. Responsive websites offer the value of two for one – they rank well on both desktop and mobile. Moreover, the design seamlessly fits the size of any screen across devices.

Optimise Content for Mobile

Mobile visitors look for the same content experience as desktop visitors. So, your content must be properly optimised for the mobile so that users can quickly find what they are looking for. You need to create content using short paragraphs, along with the addition of media, such as screenshots or infographics to make reading enjoyable.

Make Use of Infographics

The attention span of mobile users is lower than desktop users. In order to arrest and retain their attention, you can use interesting and engaging infographics. It has been proven that attractive-looking content gets shared more than three times across digital platforms compared to text-only content. The more your content is shared, the more chances your website gets to become visible on search engines and obtain a higher ranking position.

Improve Navigation

As aforementioned, mobile users lack patience; therefore, you need to remove any kind of hindrance or obstacles that visitors might have to face whilst navigating your website. You can avail affordable SEO services in order to get a professional audit report, as well as, solutions.

Link Building Strategy

For your SEO success, you must continue to build links to your desktop pages. Even though the world is moving into the mobile-first index, the importance of link building is not declining. Besides that, you must also consult with a professional SEO expert and come up with a link building a mobile strategy to make sure that your website ranks above your competitors.

Optimise On-site SEO

Once you have designed and built a responsive website, it is time to manage on-site SEO for your mobile website. From optimising title tags to H1 headers, you need to pay attention to every little detail and make sure that they are SEO-friendly. Tags in mobile, for instance, varies from tags in the desktop. Whilst desktop has about seventy-one characters, mobile gets seventy-eight characters.

Speed Up Page Load Time

Building a website for mobile with a focus on fast page speed might seem like a daunting task. However, it is important to remember that the page speed on mobile can directly impact your SEO rankings. As per reports, slow load times result in approximately ten percent increase in bounce rate and four percent decrease in conversions.

Optimise for Local Search

Unlike desktop users, mobile users are generally searching for products, services or information that are available locally. Reports also suggest that the intent of mobile users is usually to take an action. This clearly shows that you need to optimise your mobile website for the local search so that you are present at the right time and in the right place where your potential customers are looking for products or services relevant to you.

So, do you think you are prepared for mobile-first index? Follow the aforementioned tips to get started and do not let the mobile-first experience stop you from ranking well on search engines. However, to create a more in-depth SEO strategy, you must engage the services of experienced SEO professionals. Since these professionals are dedicated to continuously update themselves as per the changes in the digital world, they will be able to help you find the perfect solution.

What Is Unethical SEO and Why Should It Be Avoided?

If you are looking to hire an expert to improve your website’s ranking on Google, the first thing you need to understand is the type of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy that your service provider is planning to use. In general, SEO professionals employ either white hat or unethical SEO tactics.

How would you know the difference?

White hat SEO strategies strictly adhere to Google’s guidelines. These guidelines are put in place to ensure that their users are getting the most pertinent and accurate information related to their search keywords. With white hat strategies, you don’t need to worry too much when Google announces improvements in the current version of their search algorithm since most of these changes are geared towards weeding out SEO tactics that game the system.

Unethical SEO strategies employ deceitful practices that are often against Google’s rules to boost your page’s ranking in the short term but can permanently damage your website’s reputation once Google catches on these tricks. Google can either penalize your site by dropping your ranking or ban it altogether.

Although unethical SEO strategies may seemingly give you a competitive edge over those who adhere to the rules, there are several reasons why this strategy can be detrimental to your business. Google is always updating their algorithm to filter out these practices and penalize those sites that use them.

Here are a few unethical SEO tricks that you must know and avoid:

Invisible Text

Some websites would insert certain keywords in their websites and hide them by matching the font colour with the background. Although visitors could not see these hidden words, Google’s algorithms could still detect them. This gave some sites higher page ranks back in the day. Today, these tricks are rendered ineffective because Google has caught on to this strategy and has addressed the issue.

Cloaking

This technique used two different HTML addresses, one is meant for the visitor and the other was designed for Google’s bot. Sites that used Adobe Flash would be able to do this because Google could not view the information contained in these particular sites thus enabling some developers to show two different types of content. As a result, visitors will find that the page is shown to them is completely unrelated to their initial query thereby ruining the user experience. Google always aims to provide quality interactions with their search engine, so as to prevent this from happening, they penalized sites that employ this practice.

Duplicate Content

Some web developers plagiarise articles from popular blogs or websites hoping to direct more traffic to their own site and improve their page rank. It is essentially a “copy and paste” process. Of course, this blatant act of stealing content is prohibited and sites that do this will be subjected to penalties such as lower page rankings. Google encourages creators to produce unique and valuable content that will benefit the online community.

Rewording Content

Some try to avoid plagiarism by using software programs that simply change a few words from an existing article that is lifted from another website with synonyms. This process of automating and spinning content to create an “original” composition can result in a disjointed and sometimes incomprehensible piece that doesn’t provide any new insights.

Link Farms

This method involves creating several websites and using links that looped back to each other to trick Google into recognizing it as a trustworthy source of information. This gives the illusion that your website is popular and elicits a strong interest from readers. Google now has the capability to find these fraudulent backlinks because it can recognise that these sites often have little to no relevance to each other. Once it identifies this red flag, it can result in big drop on your page rank.