10 website errors that affect your SEO negatively

You have built a beautiful website that you and your customers would love, everything is set, and you have started investing in SEO to see your website rank high on search engine result pages. However, you keep pouring time and money but in vain. You could not see desired traffic, let alone conversions.

Why does SEO not work for you but others?

These might be the negative SEO effects, and your website building and optimization efforts might be backlashing. You would not want to waste your time and money on unyielding efforts. As a result, it is essential to hire an efficient and experienced web design agency in London.

Let us read further about which website mistakes adversely affect your SEO efforts.

1. Stuffing your website with keywords

Keywords are one of the fundamental things in SEO and a valuable strategy to find targeted customers. But it does not mean using them recklessly.

Often businesses think that stuffing their website with lots of keywords will rank their website on the search engine result page. However, it does more disservice to the company than any good.

Keyword stuffing is when you use as many targeted keywords as possible across your website content at the price of content quality. But, it irritates the reader, hurts your SEO, and puts your website at the stake of Google’s penalty.

2. Neglecting meta description and title tags

Just because you included some targeted keywords does not mean you will start ranking. An effective SEO strategy takes time and effort to deliver results. One of the factors that will generously affect your SEO is title tags and meta description.

• A title tag is a headline you can see and click on the search engine result page. It should accurately describe the content of the page.
• A meta description summarises the web page’s content. It is displayed as a search snippet under the title tag on the search engine result page.

It is essential to include keywords in title tags and meta descriptions because Google crawls them for keywords and offers the content to the appropriate audience it thinks.

3. Unrelated links

Link building is a key SEO strategy and delivers high-quality results in the long run. It can include the following type of links;

• Internal links are the links on different pages but in the same domain.
• External links are the link you add to your page pointing to another domain.
• Backlinks are the links others add to their page pointed to your domain.

However, they can offer abundant benefits only if done correctly. Squeezing unnecessary links in every sentence will wound your SEO. As a result, your anchor text must relate to the topic you are linking to and avoid adding too many links.

4. Ignoring analytical data

When the analytical data is positive, you cannot take your eyes away from your efforts and results. However, when it shows negative results, you ignore the results, required strategic change, and extra efforts.

On the contrary, when analytical data is negative, that is the actual time to analyse it and take corrective measures. You should take a good look at

• Keyword rankings
• Branded and non-branded traffic
• Bounce rate
• Approximate time on page
• Page speed
• ROI and conversions

After analysing all of the above, determine how to improve your strategies.

5. Using free website hosting services

It is convenient and budget-friendly to opt for a cheap or free website hosting service, but hosting is not as simple as it looks.

A free or cheap hosting service can affect your domain authority negatively because they host many websites on the same IP address. Hence, Google thinks they are related, and their domain authority influences one another. When so many websites influence your domain, it can help if websites have high authority but can hurt it if they do not.

6. Neglecting alt tags for images

Adding alt tags to your pictures is one of the simplest SEO techniques, where you need to add a title to the image you are going to use. This will tell Google what the image is about, and if you add targeted keywords to it, it will increase your chances of ranking high on the search engine result page – twin advantage.

Also Read: How to build a brand from scratch? – A definitive guide

7. Not dealing with broken links

When you link to a website and if the page is deleted without your knowledge, you have gained a broken link or dead link. Moreover, having too many broken links will signal to Google that you do not keep your website updated, vandalising your SEO.

8. No 404 page

It is a landing page that users find when the page they are looking for is not available or does not exist. A visitor might get a 404 error when:

• Server is down
• Page was moved
• Page was not there in the first place
• URL is broken or is wrong

Incorporating a 404 page on your website is quintessential because it tells the users that you care about their experience and want to keep them on your site. Moreover, you can design it in a funny tone to make the users smile.

9. Not having a TLS certificate

TLS certificate is issued by Certificate Authority (CA) and states that you own your domain and it is secure. However, when you do not have a TLS certificate, your URL will start as HTTP instead of HTTPS, and a few years back, Google declared that it would prioritise ranking websites with HTTPS URLs.

Hence, it is vital to get a valid TLS certificate.

10. Not using the power of social media

Social media can boost your website traffic by promoting it on various platforms. Here, you can benefit from social media marketing services in the UK to increase social media followers, engagement, and ultimately expand your website audience.

Social media marketing services are essential to generate insightful posts, actively respond to comments & messages, and conduct effective marketing campaigns to boost your sales.

SEO is laborious and time-consuming but can deliver tremendous results over time if handled correctly. Hence, it is essential to avoid some common website mistakes to dodge unpleasant consequences.