8 SEO Mistakes That Are Eating Your Rankings

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8 SEO Mistakes That Are Eating Your Rankings
Like many marketers, you too invested in SEO with
a hope to gain big returns. But, as time passed,
you discovered that all the efforts you had made
were of no use since it hardly helped your
website gain momentum and achieve rankings. Now
you are feeling like all the resource and time
you spent on SEO is wasted. Every time you
checked your rankings, you found little or no
results. Your SEO Efforts Backfired? Here Are 8
Reasons- With my incessant twenty long years in
the SEO industry, I can guess why your SEO
strategy didnt work. Following are the 8
possible reasons 1. You Have Chosen Wrong
Keywords-
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Targeting wrong keywords in pages and posts could
be disastrous for your search engine rankings.
This is something that could sabotage your SEO
strategy. Before even starting to do keyword
research, you have to have a deep understanding
of your audience and what theyre looking for
online. Have a look on these two keywords-
Gadgets for Sale Buy Gadgets, they are two
different keywords that symbolize different user
intent. How To Fix? For better and precise
keywords research, I would suggest you to go with
tools like Ahrefs to determine which keywords
are worth targeting and which arent. They will
help you identify keywords, check / recheck
keywords and evaluate the competition. Its
recommended to keep the keyword metric checked
multiple times to ensure that youre investing
for the right keywords. 2. Your Website Lacks at
Content Quality-
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There is no doubt about it. Poorly written and
spammy content kills your website search
rankings. A content piece is said to be of poor
quality if it doesnt offer any value to the
readers and vague in all its forms. Quality
content poses multiple qualities. Its
informative, accurate, insightful, analytical
and unbiased. If your content lacks at above
qualities, its compromised. Some of the
instances of poor content include thin content,
spun content and duplicate content etc. Thin
content Googles panda update was launched to
tame websites with poor-quality content. A
website is said to be the possession of thin
content if it contains less content, high
proportion of navigation/image/dynamic elements
excessive blank pages and ad- stuffing. All
these elements together hurt the overall
user-experience. Auto-generated content If your
website is found having instances of
automatically translated content, scraped
content from Atom/RSS feeds or search results,
your website could be punished under Google
Panda. All the above content types are referred
as auto-generated content. Duplicate Content If
a content piece appears on the Internet in more
than one place, its called duplicate content.
They dont technically invite penalty, yet,
impact search rankings. Content with Keyword
Stuffing Google flags Keyword Stuffing if you
randomly and repeatedly put your exact-match
keywords within your content to manipulate search
algorithms. Keyword stuffing hurts your content
quality and rankings as well. Google has inbuilt
algorithms and guidelines to track instances of
keyword stuffing and punish the spammers who try
to rank their website through this black hat
method. How To Fix? Keep your content quality
upright and intact. Use keywords moderately and
at an extent so that the page readability should
be intact. Avoid having to use spun or
auto-generated content pages. 3. You didnt
Work on Basic Hygiene-
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Gone are the days when your websites started
ranking just because you included right keywords
at the right place in your website content. Now
the fight is getting fiercer. Not only the
keywords, but pages Meta description and title
tags will also have a significant impact on site
SEO. Despite all your efforts, if your website
rankings dipped, there might be a chance that
you inadvertently left your Meta title and
description un-optimized. Meta Title and
Description Meta Title and Description tells
searchers what your content is all about. Even
Google takes them into consideration to define
what the rest of your content is going to
explain. On the basis of that, Google presents
your content to your appropriate audience. If you
leave the sites Meta description and title
unattended, you can miss a great search engine
optimization opportunity. Broken Links Too many
broken links make your website cluttered. More
the outgoing links your website contains more
will be the chances of broken link starts to
appear. If a website that you linked to, deletes
the pages or make changes to it, broken links
appear. If Google finds you in the possession of
too many broken links, youre taken as one who
doesnt keep his website updated, which Google
doesnt like. How to Fix? Therefore, you need to
regularly audit broken links to either fix them
or remove them altogether. In order to get each
of your website pages ranked on Google, you need
to optimize the Meta title and description of
the pages for the right keywords. 4. You Didnt
Work on External / Internal Links-
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Linking, whether inbound or outbound impacts your
pages search position. When site A links to
site B, it simply passes along link juice from
one site to the other. More the external pages
are linked to a page on your website, more
valuable becomes your site in the eyes of the
search engines. Similarly, internal pages of your
website too can pass some of their link juice
along to another internal page within website.
For instance, if you interlink your homepage with
a product page, your homepage is lending some of
its search engine trust factor to that product
page. It helps you build the authority of some of
the deeper pages on your site. Go with our link
building services to fix that mess. If you out
rightly pour irrelevant links into your content,
it will hurt your content quality. Moreover, if
theyre irrelevant to the content of the page
theyre on, they will kill your rankings. How
To Fix? While linking pages internally or with
external websites, make sure that the anchor text
youre using should rightly align to the actual
topic of the page that youre linking to. 5.
Your Website Takes Ages to Load-
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• Slow loading websites kill user experience,
  reduces user interest and give them a reason to
  switch over. Even Google takes note of the
  websites that loads slowly. Sometimes it hurts
  domain authority as well. The reason is pretty
  obvious. If your website takes longer to load,
  visitors are more likely to bounce off your
  website. And eventually, a spike in bounce rate
  leads to bad user experience and a serious dent
  on its overall authority. Its worth noting that
  even milliseconds are crucial when it comes to
  ranking on Google.
• How To Fix?
• Tools like GTMetrix helps you find your current
  website speed score. The tool offers a
  comprehensive statistics on your page speed
  metric with various factors that are hindering
  it. Following are a few tweaks that you can
  implement to boost the site speed.
• Minimize HTTP Requests. ...
• Reduce server response time. ...
• Enable compression. ...
• Enable browser caching. ...
• Minify Resources. ...
• Optimize images. ...
• Optimize CSS Delivery. ...
• Prioritize above-the-fold content

6. Your Website Images have Un-optimized Alt
Tags-
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Images play a significant role in your SEO
efforts. Though, marketers quite often forget to
even consider it. If your images are optimized
for SEO, users can find them when they search
through the images tab. Image optimization is a
simple process. Just add alt text and a file
title to each image on your website, and youre
done. It would be better to include the targeted
keywords in the Alt and title fields. It
will help Google to rank you for the searches
your target audience looks around. 7. Negative
SEO-
Your nearest competitors might go at any extent
to destroy your search ranking and malign your
online reputation. They use negative SEO as a
tool to hit your website metrics
badly. Technically, Negative SEO is a set of
activities aimed at that competitors run to lower
other competitors rankings in search results.
Some of the key activities performed in
the negative SEO are building unnatural links,
hacking the site and modifying its content. Link
forms Creating Link forms is the core of any
negative SEO campaign. To hurt your search
rankings, your competitors build links from a
group of interconnected sites, or link farms
using the same anchor text in most
cases. Scrapped Content
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To ruin your rankings, scrapers scrap and copy
your content across other sites. In case a
content piece is found to be duplicated across
multiple sites, Google takes action against the
stolen version of the content. How to Fix? To
avoid the threat, use tools like Copyscape to
find instances of duplication. You may report it
to Google and can also request the webmasters to
withdraw that scrapped content from the
website. Getting Your Site de-indexed If your
competitor manages to make even a small change in
robots.txt, it could wreak havoc on your entire
SEO strategy. Just a disallow rule, and your
website would be out of Googles index. How to
Fix? Regular ranking checks will help you know if
your site gets deindexed. If ranking drop
happens across a big number of keywords, check
the crawl stats in Google Search Console to
check if its due to penalty or
de-indexation. 8. Your Backlinks Backfired-
Incoming links could be integral and important to
your SEO strategy if achieved moderately with a
plan in place. If incoming links to your website
can help your website rank better and become a
brand, they can hit it badly too. While making
backlinks keep the following in mind
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• Avoid building too many links too fast. Go slow
  and steady.
• Avoid using keyword anchor text links.
• Dont direct all your links to your home page.
  Keep the links diversified across the website
• Dont indulge in buying or exchanging links and
  never participate in any link scheme.
• Conclusion-
• SEO takes time to showing results. If you think
  that a website, a few pages in it and a bunch of
  targeted keywords will altogether bring humongous
  traffic, better to take a break. SEO is a
  comprehensive process that always helps you gain
  big if you ensure that youre not making some
  big mistakes that could sabotage your overall
  strategy.