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Jan 23, 2014

Do you want to see your website at the bottom of Google’s search results? Are you afraid people may find your website when they do an online search?

Hopefully you'll be answering 'no' to all these questions, so if you want to see your search engine ranking increase, avoid making the following 5 mistakes.

Create web pages for Google, rather than people

Google’s webmaster guidelines state that it’s bad practice to focus on pleasing the search engine, rather than engaging with web users. For example, if you stuff your copy with keywords, you are more likely to be picked up by Google’s algorithm updates and penalised.

Here’s a way to ruin your ranking:

“Safari holidays in the safari holiday destination of Kenya – safari holidays for people
searching for the perfect safari holiday.”

A more engaging sentence would be something like:

“Are you searching for the perfect safari holiday? Our travel specialists know Kenya inside out, and can’t wait to create you a holiday of a lifetime!”

Leave your website content alone

If you don’t update your website over time, the least it will do is stay exactly where it is in Google search results. But if other businesses in your field are updating their content regularly, your stagnant site is going to be pushed down.

Write poor or unoriginal content

Google never tells people exactly what determines the way it ranks websites, but it does tell us what techniques to avoid. One of these is automatically generated content, or “scraped” content taken from other websites, as well as poorly written content that makes no sense to the user. Write well-informed, original content, however, and you are more likely to see a traffic increase.

Buy backlinks

Google clearly advises against link sharing schemes and purchasing backlinks from SEO companies – so if you want to fall out with Google, go ahead and buy backlinks! But if you’re trying to make a positive difference to your website’s ranking, we suggest putting your money into Google Adwords, or obtaining links organically through things like guest blogging and social media.

Have broken links

If the links on your website point to the wrong domain, or they simply don’t work at all, you’re at risk of falling out of favour with Google. Therefore, it’s good practice to give your website a thorough check every few months to check that all your links still work.

For more information about SEO and web design, have a browse of our other blog posts or get in touch with us!

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