We are often telling you about what to do to get your site to perform well but we rarely tell you what NOT to do. Google is getting better and better and working out who is manipulating search results and Here are a few things to avoid like the plague when attempting to get a site to rank well.
Spammy Link Building
Dodgy link building is the single most likely reason for a site to get penalised. In recent months Google has rolled out a number of big link related updates. Historically linking provided a quick route to ranking success. It was once the case that the purchase of a few hundred exact match anchor text links was a sure fire way of securing a top ten result. This meant lots of low quality sites appearing in search results, so Google hit back with some heavy penalties for those caught building spammy links. The bottom line: don’t use spammy link building to rank.
Over Optimised Content
Web copy is very different to all other types of copy. It has to read well whilst ranking for certain keywords. There is a fine line between ensuing your content is optimised enough to perform and ending up with over optimised content that doesn’t make any sense to readers. When creating content it’s crucial that you compromise. You want to end up with content that reads well at the same time as containing your targeted keywords. In the past SEO’s were able to achieve performance through keyword stuffing i.e. jamming keywords into content as many times as possible. Google actively looks for sites that contain spammy, keyword stuffed content and if your site is found to be over optimised, you could face a penalty. Bottom line: If your content doesn’t read well, its probably over optimised.
Bad User Experience
User experience is a combination of things: how the site looks, how safe it appears to be, how many adverts appear, how easy it is to navigate around. One of the best ways of finding out how good the user experience of your site is, is to look at the bounce rate. Sites with bad user experience tend to have high bounce rates. One major contributor to bad user experience is a difficulty to find the content you are looking for. Nothing is more frustrating that landing on a site and not being a few clicks from what you are after. Moreover if users can’t find content search engines may also struggle which means restricted ranking. Bottom Line: If users are confused/frustrated by your website, search engines will be too.
If you are struggling to get your site to perform and need some help from the experts talk to Miromedia. We have over ten years experience in search engine optimisation, website design & development and overall website user experience. Get in touch now to find out more.
