How Your SEO Might Be Killing Your Website

Whilst search engine optimization is often favoured for the ways that it can help to boost the ranking of a website, when done wrong it can actually work to do the opposite. If, after reading this list, you think that your SEO strategy might be working against you, you should seek the help and advice you need as soon as possible.

• Your brand new website has been completely written in Flash, which makes all of your carefully SEO’d content invisible to search engines.
• You have forgotten to redirect your old pages after getting a new website created, which causes broken links (Google hates these).
• You have included a splash (or intro) page. In terms of SEO, this is useless and actually works to make your navigations more complex.
• You have utilized black hat SEO when you could have achieved the same results using white hat tactics (not that black hat works anyway).
• You have multiple domains with the same content on each. Whilst this can help with link building, search engines hate duplicate content.
• You have used a site-wide meta description. Whilst this is valuable for SEO, if someone else steals is your ranking will drop (they need to differ).

Any of the above mistakes could actually be working to kill whatever ranking your website has managed to garner. If you aren’t sure whether your Search Engine Optimization has been slowly killing your website or if you know for a fact that it has been causing problems, you need to take immediate actions to rectify these mistakes.

Myth – Your Website Doesn’t Need SEO

Many people scoff when they hear others talking about search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies, because they believe that their own website is better off without one. They may have even been advised by an ‘expert’ that this is the case. If you want your business to succeed online, however, the reality of the situation is that you do need some sort of SEO strategy to boost your visibility.

The source of this myth probably lies with the websites of some brands, celebrities, famous musicians and popular bloggers who don’t actually need SEO to get their websites at number one. Of course the people behind these websites don’t need to optimise – everyone in the state (if not the country or even the world) knows their name, which is advertisement enough.
 

If you are some little known brand, a rock group who is just breaking into the industry, or a new blogger on the scene, you cannot expect the same sort of success. Instead, you need to optimise your website using keywords, good quality content, link building and other SEO strategies, otherwise you will never get discovered.

Even though common sense dictates that famous and popular brands, musicians, bloggers, and so on will not need SEO to get their websites to rank well, there are still plenty of ‘experts’ out there who proclaim that no one needs SEO; that it is a waste of time and money. At the end of the day, however, optimisation is needed if you want to get your name out into the public sphere and increase traffic to your website.

Myth – You Need To Crank Out As Much Content As Possible For SEO To Work

There are a number of professionals out there who claim to be search engine optimisation (SEO) ‘experts’, whilst in the same breath explain that you need to continuously crank out as much content as possible if you want any such strategy to work. In all reality, these people have no idea what they’re talking about and you would do better to take your SEO work (and your money) elsewhere.

The origins of this myth lie in the fact that this was a strategy that was widely practiced amongst website owners. If they ever wanted to target a new keyword, they would create a new page, copy across some of the content from a related page, reword it slightly, and voila – your SEO strategy is working as good as ever.

When Google released their Panda update, however, one of their aims was to put a stop to less than ethical SEO techniques such as this. Through this update, Google hope to wheedle out the high-quality content from the spam, as they endeavour to make the web browsing experience better for all involved. Their search engine spiders will now look for duplicate, overlapping or redundant content that is written on the same or similar topics with keyword variations and completely disregard these pages. Why would you use an SEO technique that is no longer indexed?

Regardless of the updates made by Google, there are still plenty of ‘experts’ and SEO professionals out there who think that cranking out as much content as possible will get their clients the rankings that they so desire. These days, however, Google and the other search engines are looking for high-quality content rather than high-quantity content, so you would be better off looking into other SEO strategies.

Myth – SEO Is A One Time Thing

Many people wrongly assume that search engine optimization (SEO) is a one time deal – they give an ‘expert’ a once off payment; the expert goes through their website and adds in keywords and tags and so on; and the website has now been properly optimized. In reality, SEO is a area that needs to be consistently maintained and updated – once off work will not cut it.

This is nothing more than a myth peddled by less-than-legitimate SEO companies who are looking to make a quick buck – the competition is always changing and Google is always updating its algorithms. If you want your website to succeed on the search engines (reach number one or even the first page), you cannot simply sit back and relax – SEO is a slow and on going process.

Still not convinced? Why not start by looking at the point of SEO – to achieve the best search engine ranking possible (as this will, hopefully, encourage users to employ your products or services). Once you reach that number one position, however, your job is not ‘finished’ – you need to work hard to keep that position by utilizing even more SEO techniques.

Even though it should be clear that SEO is not a one time thing, there are plenty of supposed SEO ‘experts’ out there who will try to tell you that this is the case – whilst they can optimise your sit for a once off fee, it is not likely to get you good results for long (if at all). Instead, you should be looking to hire a reputable SEO company that will work on your optimization on an on-going basis and will generate the results you crave.