When it comes to optimizing your website or web page, it is invaluable to determine what the best practices are in order to have staying power on the worldwide web. It is only in the rare instances that after incorporating such practices, your website rankings haven’t improved it is equally invaluable to look at the things you may be doing to hurt your internet presence through poor habits which need to be rectified. I have put together 7 habits SEO’s must unlearn in 2019 which have damaged their progress.
1. Moving away from pull-down menus
Using pull-down menus makes it impossible for spiders to decipher information from your website/page. As spiders are designed to gather the information from your website and pull it up when a search is made, it would be in your best interest to make sure that there is alternative navigation to the pages the drop-down list would provide.
2. Tweaking your splash page or adding more content to the homepage
With homepages being weighted as the most valuable page on your website/page, adding keywords to it in the content you write would be the difference between ranking at the top of search engines or not.
3. Spreading your site across multiple domains
In order to balance the load, some website owners spread their domains across many different domains. The challenge with this is that it creates a dilution on the PageRank. A PageRank by the oxford definition is, “a value assigned to a web page as a measure of its popularity or importance, used to determine the order in which search engine results are presented.” Diluting your PageRank, therefore, would mean that in a search your website’s impact on the search engine would be diminished.
4. Having pop-ups on your website
Other than the fact that readers hate pop-ups with a passion to the point of installing pop-up blockers, many search engines don’t index java-script based pop-ups so the content, so the content in the popup will not be indexed.
5. Error pages on the site
In an image-conscious society, first impressions can make or break your website. If a first-timer chooses your website to scroll through to find that there are one or more error pages, they may be put off completely and go to the next site.
6. Using “Click Here” for your hyperlink text
As emphasized before in this post, using keywords is paramount to ranking higher on the search engines. Since Google affiliates the link to the page being linked to, you have to make that anchor text relevant.
7. Mentioning competitors in meta tags
Due to the laws surrounding incorporating competitors in your own website, doing so without their written permission may result in lawsuits being laid against you.
These are just a few habits websites and web pages with edgy font and trendy graphics, have gone about SEO with no positive results. It would be beneficial to have a look at your own website to determine whether you may be guilty of one or more of the above-mentioned undesirable SEO habits to get your site ranking high on the top search engines.
