Whether you have a website or some other online business venture, your goals are the same and that’s to have specific traffic. To go about this, you must get your site ranked high in the search engines. If you are good at your SEO, you will find that you not only get the traffic you want but your conversion rate will increase, too. However, if you are new to the whole SEO concept, then you might make mistakes that will harm your site in the long run.
Your main goal should be to get the search engines to approve of your site, not ban it completely. This is why it’s essential that you pay attention to what you can’t do if you hope to be successful. You are about to read some blunders you shouldn’t make if you hope to get that targeted traffic that converts.
Too Much Graphics
Using graphics and images can be a great way to enhance any website, but putting too many up will actually be damaging your SEO efforts. Having a high number of images on your website will leave less room for search engine-friendly content, which will lead to a lower ranking. The text that appears on images is not like the plain text you have on your pages. Search engines can’t read the text you have showing on your images, which makes them worthless for SEO purposes. If you really do want to use images, you should have your main keywords in the image’s ALT attribute. This way search engines would be able to read this attribute in the image, which will ultimately help your ranking.
Faulty Internal Linking
Faulty internal linking is a huge mistake that even many marketers don’t know they are making. It’s difficult to control how other sites link to you, but you have total control when it comes to linking your internal pages. Not only will your web pages rank higher, which results in more traffic but you will make your site more user-friendly to its visitors. Most people focus on creating links that send their visitors someplace else. But when you put everything in place, you’ll see great results. And these results last for a long time. A perfect example of a good internal linking structure is Wikipedia; notice how they have all of these links that send you to a page with a similar topic?
Spamming
Link spamming is when someone distributes their URL across the web to get incoming links, while getting links is important; you will be penalized if you get too many at once. When a person launches a website, he/she reads that creating thousands of links will get you on the first page of Google. But this doesn’t work that way, as search engines like natural link building. Do your SEO the right way from the beginning because Google is very strict on new sites and will sandbox you for the littlest misstep, like spamming your link on other people’s sites. For the best results, you have to build links in a natural way; the same way that you will get them if you weren’t adding them yourself.
Overall, your aim with SEO should be to keep it as ethical as possible. Some webmasters have no idea the damage the above mistakes can do to their websites. Don’t just stuff keywords in your site or it will be viewed as spam. You should also know that using copied content will turn readers off and the search engines will penalize you, too. Therefore, no matter if you’re going to hire an SEO professional or you’re going to do it yourself, you need to use the best SEO techniques.