4 things that will kill your SEO ranking

 

There’s no point in having the best website in the world if you cannot be found within search engines. Going even further, the majority of people do not go past the first page of Google (which has around a 92% market share within the UK).

With Search Engine Optimisation for Estate Agents it isn’t just blackhat SEO tricks that can make your website lose its rankings. There are several different problems that could have caused websites not to be able to rank well within Search Engines.

Four of the biggest problems for not ranking well are:

• 1. Too Much Flash
  
  Flash can make your website look great and original but as we know flash has many downfalls when it comes to SEO. Though flash website can give you a great user experience with videos, animation and images, the crawlers just can’t see any of it.
  
  If your website is built using flash, you will also have to include content and a crawlable navigation to help the crawlers move around your website. This will allow all the pages to be understood by the Search Engines, in turn enabling them to be ranked. 
• 2. Blocking the Search Engine Crawlers
  
  Google has given webmasters the ability to control where the crawlers can and cannot go on their websites. They do this by using a Robots.txt file which simple tells the crawlers not to crawl a certain page.
  
  The problem comes when webmasters block the root folder of the website, preventing the crawler from accessing every page and obviously if the website can’t be crawled it can’t rank.
• 3. Duplicate content
  
  With Google’s last algorithm update good quality content has never been more crucial for ranking well. As Google wants searchers to have the best user experience possible, they are now ranking the sites highly for good quality content.
  
  Duplicate content is considered by Google to be poor content and bad for the user experience meaning it will get ranked poorly (if ranked at all).
• 4. 301 redirects and canonical tags
  
  301 redirects is a signal to let crawlers know that a page has been permanently moved to a new URL. Canonical tags are used to tell crawlers that a few URL’s lead to the same page. 
  
  These tags shouldn’t be combined. If used incorrectly canonical tags can prevent clear indexing to a website. 

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant