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Some Content Mistakes That Could Affect Your Website Rankings
Nobody sets out with the intention of shooting themselves in the foot. Sadly, this is precisely what many online businesses unknowingly do with their web content.
Oftentimes, the secret to successful SEO lies in taking things back to basics. Or perhaps, simply avoiding the kinds of common mistakes that can steer things in the wrong direction.
As things stand right now, what follows is a brief overview of six of the most typical on-page errors that can stunt an otherwise effective SEO strategy:
1. Duplicate Content
Contrary to popular belief, duplicate content does not necessarily harm a site’s SEO profile. If the duplicate copy in question is rightfully yours, it simply has no SEO value whatsoever. A debate laid to rest recently by Google’s John Mueller, who confirmed that duplicate content is simply ignored when a site is crawled.
Of course, duplicate content copied without consent from other people’s sites could cripple your SEO campaign.
2. Link Misuse
The misuse and manipulation of links is rife. Even today, thousands of spam sites are popping up daily for the sole purpose of posting low-grade backlinks. A common approach to black-hat SEO, but one that has not been effective for several years. Spam links are just too easy for search engines to detect and have any positive impact whatsoever.
If anything, link manipulation is a good way of getting yourself a potential Google penalty.
3. Cloaked or Hidden Content
This is where a website is populated with vast quantities of low-quality copy, which the visitor never sees. Instead, it is written purely to embed as many popular keywords and search terms as possible into the site’s content. The copy is usually completely nonsensical and illegible, written and published purely for search engine crawlers.
The only problem being, it doesn’t work - cloaked copy is easy to detect and rarely goes unpunished.
4. Too Many Redirects
Redirects are almost always interpreted by search engines as a form of deception. Or at least, sending visitors to pages and places they had no real intent of visiting. Unless redirects are absolutely necessary, they should be avoided where possible.
The more redirects your site features, the more questionable your user-experience becomes.
5. Using Irrelevant Keywords
Millions of online businesses are guilty of occasionally using irrelevant keywords, in an attempt to pull in more traffic. Two issues here - the first of which being the complete lack of logic. If the keywords are not relevant to your business, you will pull in equally irrelevant traffic of no value.
Secondly, use of irrelevant keywords can take a major toll on your site’s SEO performance.
6. Infrequent or Sporadic Publishing
Last up, it is (sadly) not enough to simply dump thousands of pages of content on your site and let it be. For one thing, dumping masses of content onto a website within a short period of time never fails to set alarm bells ringing. In addition, the major search engines like Google always show preference to sites where new content of quality and relevance is added regularly.
For your content marketing strategy to work, it needs to be consistent and continuous.