15 Things That Can Hurt Your Site Rankings (SEO Checklist)

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What can be the worst nightmare for a webmaster? Well, surely it will be the sudden drop in their website ranking. So, ultimately it means their hard work has gone down the drain. If you are one of those unlucky individuals, don’t worry. You are not alone, there are plenty of individuals who suffer from this situation.

SEO Checklist

Each and every website must have faced it or will face a steep decline in their ranking in the future. One thing is sure, you can’t avoid it, but you can reduce the impact it causes. How? With some best SEO checklist.

Keep in mind that the drop in page ranking can occur due to multiple reasons. In this article, we will check out the 15 major ones that you should know about and which can be resolved with some good seo on page optimization services.

SEO Mistakes To Avoid For Ranking On Google

1) Make Sure To Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Are you using the same keyword repeatedly? Well, it is time to stop it. Now you might stuff keywords into your website if it makes sense. But if you are simply adding keywords for optimization, then this will be a rude awakening for you.

If you check your seo analysis report you can see that there is a huge reduction in the number of visitors. People get irritated when they read content that has unnecessary words which never make sense.

Not only will it discourage them from reading, but it will also be a red sign for search engines. Google search engine will easily understand that you are trying to outsmart them and their algorithms. You must try to reduce the excess keywords and make sure that the density is somewhere around 15%.

2) Usage Of Images For Linking To Pages On Website

One thing you might be surprised to know that search engines cannot read images. They can only read a text. So, if Google is not able to view the text of a link (I.e. if it is in the form of a button or clickable image), then the link won’t be read properly.

Now if any of the pages in your website are accessible through buttons or images, then they won’t get indexed by Google. It is recommended by Google that each page of your website should have at least a single text link.

3) Website Speed Slow

Commonly, half of the online users like or they expect web pages to load within 2-3 seconds or even less. If any website doesn’t load within 4 seconds, then users would abandon that website.

You must make sure that your website loads quickly which is through leveraging the browser caching, minifying the codes, optimizing images and other things.

4) Having Bad Redirects

Do you know how a redirect occurs? It is when a visitor opens the URL and is taken to another URL. Let’s consider a scenario. You have a page

www.test.com/offer-sales

which is ranked at the front page of Google search.

This page gets about 20K visitors each month. Now due to some modifications that need to be one in the design or coding, the developer will redirect this URL to the homepage which is www.test.com.

Frankly, this is a bad redirect as it won’t be fulfilling the requirement of the user requirement. Here the user is looking for some of the best deals or offers in shoes but he or she is redirected to a page which has no information regarding the deals.

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5) Not Allowing Google To Know The Homepage

If you are aware of the web address of the site you are going to visit, all you need to do is type www.website.com or just “website.com”. Here either of the address will take you to the same website.

However, as per the best SEO checklist, this is bad as Google is not a fan of such kind of ambiguity. For Google, it likes you to tell which web address you prefer (I.e. whether it is www or no www). Now if you don’t tell, then you are just splitting up the SEO authority of your website. This will then lower your Google ranking.

6) Avoid Purchasing Links

You must provide your website with enough time to be successful. Keep in mind that creating some good content is hard work however, it will pay off in the end. If you resort to shortcuts like purchasing backlinks from an unreliable source, then you will be penalized. As soon as Google comes to know that you are doing such activity, they will cut down your page ranking significantly.

7) Website Taking A Lot Of Time To Load

For Google, it always strives to provide a good experience to users. So, if a website takes a long time to load, it will hurt the user-experience and even will end up in getting penalized by Google.

TRY OUR GOOGLE PAGE SPEED TESTING

8) Lack Of Necessary Keywords

Now your website must be related to coffee and you end up using words like ‘mountain grown’ and ‘espresso’, your users won’t be able to find your website. While you are evaluating your website, try to make sure there are plenty of keywords (necessary ones) which are commonly used for searching your services.

9) Usage Of Link Building Schemes Which Add No Or Little Value To World

Generally, having good links to your website might and even improve the Google ranking of your website. Here the problem is that people try to misunderstand the importance of seo on page optimization. People tend to game the system by creating links using dubious methods.

Some even end up in trading or purchasing links from websites that are considered to be web spammers. Google is strict against such malpractices and often penalize those websites.

10) Getting Rid Of Ads

As per the recent seo analysis report, Google has made changes to the AdSense rules. In short, it has made it stricter especially for those websites that have more advertising content than the published one. If you are following such practice, then better get rid of this bad SEO practice.

11) Pages Loading With Irrelevant Keywords

Some people might end up placing keywords which don’t make sense. What they are trying to do is manipulate their ranking on Google. However, they never realize that this will simply frustrate the users. Using original and useful content with meaningful keywords will provide a good experience to users.

12) Presences Of Duplicate Content

As per Google, duplicate content refers to those blocks of content which are within or across the domains matches (completely) with other content or are somewhat similar. Now if you have updated your content and a huge part of it is found to be duplicate, then it will have a negative effect on the ranking of your website.

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13) Hiding Links

Previously, one can easily increase the ranking in search engines by stuffing a huge amount of links which might seem similar in colour as the page’s background. Such measures won’t add any value and have not worked for years. So, avoid doing it.

14) Presences Of Various Page Links

If you have pages that are overrunning with links, then it would not be user-friendly. You might get the impression that the page is used for perpetuating clicks to other pages. In reality, it won’t have stand-alone value.

15) Non-Submission Of Google Sitemap

Now, most of the search engines are great in finding out all the pages present on your website, still, they aren’t that perfect. By submitting a sitemap to Google, you can easily improve Google’s ability to find all the pages present on your website.

TRY OUR GOOGLE SITEMAP GENERATOR 

Wrapping Up 

Before you indulge in any search engine tactics, you need to know what is on page seo methods. Well, to put in simple terms it refers to various search engine optimization methods you might try to make your website more customer-friendly and engaging.