Achieving a top search ranking for your website’s target keywords isn’t always easy. The difficulty is certainly magnified if you make one or more of the following SEO mistakes.
Broken Links
Whether they are internal or external, allowing broken links to remain on your website may hurt your search optimization efforts. Search engines work by crawling websites, using links to find new pages and other sites. If your website contains broken links, however, the search engines won’t be able to perform this critical function.
The good news is that you don’t have to manually check each and every link to ensure they work. Just visit http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/, enter your site’s URL into the box at the top of the page and click “Find broken links.” The tool will then reveal whether or not your site has broken links, and where those links are located.
Linking to Non-Credible Sources
Think carefully about the sites to which you link. Linking to irrelevant sites that are riddled with spam may have a negative impact on your own site’s search rankings. If you are concerned about the possibility of visitors linking to low-quality sites, use the no-follow tag to prevent search engines from following them. Most of the major content management systems (CMS) already use the no-follow tag for visitor comments by default, protecting the site’s integrity.
Writing Content for Search Engines
Another all-too-common SEO mistake is writing content for search engines rather than visitors. It’s no secret that Google, Bing and Yahoo analyze the text on a webpage to help determine where and how to rank it. But this doesn’t mean that you should stuff X number of keywords into your articles for the sake of trying to rank for those words. This tactic may have worked in the past, but the search engines have since updated their ranking algorithm to prevent this manipulative practice.
Buying Links
Don’t make the mistake of purchasing links. Even if you have good intentions, Google views paid links as a violation of its Webmasters Guidelines, and thus may penalize your website for it. You might be wondering how Google would know if you paid for a link. Well, being the world’s largest and most successful tech company, it is more than capable of distinguishing between a natural/organic link and a paid link. You may sneak a couple paid links by undetected, but the Big G will eventually spot them and penalize your website as a result.
