SEO Mistakes That Can Cause Devastating Results

 

Search engine optimisation is the process that impacts the visibility of a website within the search engines. Google ranks your website on thousands of signals, which determine where your website appears on the search engine results page for the specific keyword.

When done properly and following Google’s guidelines, SEO can be very rewarding. However there are many old and bad SEO practices that are still quite common among many estate agents that you should avoid, otherwise you may find your website being heavily penalised by Google.

Here are the 8 most dangerous SEO practices that you should avoid at all costs:

1) Keyword stuffing

This is a very dated SEO practice, which involves stuffing your content full of keywords. Once upon a time this practice worked quite well (a long, long time ago). Today, it will result in being knocked down the search results as Google doesn’t tolerate this sort of practice.   

2) Copying content

Writing content is a long, timely and sometimes difficult process. In many cases this leads to website owners stealing content from other websites. Clearly this is wrong and Google can spot this easily. It can result in a decline in your rankings or Google may even de-index the page all together. All content should be in your own words, never copy it!  

3) Producing poor quality content

Poor quality content is usually produced in a hurry or by inexperienced people. Content is king and should be treated as such. Make sure that the content is on a topic that will be of interest to your audience, that you have researched it and proofread it before publishing.

4) Not using unique title tags

Your title tags are prime real estate for your keywords, so don’t waste these tags! Make sure that the title tags are unique and relevant to the page.

5) Using the wrong keywords

You may think you are using the right keywords but in many cases these keywords or phrases just aren’t searched for by people. Make sure you are only optimising your content for words or phrases people actually search for. This will involve some keyword research.

6) Not removing broken links

If a link ceases to point to the intended page (due to the page having been removed) then this is now a broken link. Broken links will earn you a bad reputation in the eyes of Google (and your audience) and can result in penalisation. Keep your website up-to-date and remove all broken links.

7) Poor quality links

High quality links are one of the most important SEO factors. If you are going to link to a website make sure it is a high quality and authoritative website. And try to only get the most relevant and high quality websites to link to you too.

8) Not monitoring analytics

It is vital to monitor your analytics to ensure all the work you are doing is benefitting your website and business. If you don’t measure your analytics, then you can’t measure the impact of the SEO. Google Analytics and Webmaster tools are the best tools you can use to monitor this.