SEO is complex and an ever-evolving science. It is also a long and arduous process. It takes months, if not years, for businesses to reach their desired position in search engine rankings, even when they get everything right about SEO. If they commit any mistakes in terms of SEO, then it only means more time and energy to reach their desired goals. Needless to say, there’s a lot at stake to minimize mistakes for the businesses. But, Google does not share the details of how its search algorithms rank websites and their content. That being said, Google does share some Do’s and Don’ts for all SEO managers. Here are some of the most common mistakes that webmasters and SEO managers commit, despite explicit warning from Google and seasoned SEO experts.
Linking Images to Webpages
Images are important for SEO. But, search engines themselves cannot read and identify the images. So, they have to rely on the text to recognize content. For this reason, images, links, videos and other types of content have explanatory text associated with them. For instance, images are accompanied by Alt Text.
But, when you link webpages to an image – say on home page banners, portfolio carousels, etc. – search engines do not read the images as links at all. So, those links, internal or external, do not benefit your website. What’s worse is that if any of the webpages are linked exclusively with images, then those webpages will never get crawled and indexed by Google. They are as good as nonexistent, as far as your SEO efforts are concerned. If you absolutely must link images to webpages, you have two options before you. Either have some caption text for each image, which can then be linked to the webpages, instead of the images themselves, or make sure that there are other text links somewhere else on the website leading to those webpages.
Unnecessary Usage of Keywords
Although keywords continue to be relevant for SEO, many webmasters tend to take their keyword-obsession to the extreme. Search engines can recognize these practices and penalize websites by dropping their search engine rankings. Some of the practices that can attract heavy penalty from search engines include keyword stuffing, using multiple instances of keywords in meta title, meta descriptions, and headings, creating content with high keyword density, and so on. Always create content that is useful and valuable to users. It shouldn’t be something that attracts visitors to your website and disappoints them.
Not Redirecting the Website Internally
Search engines consider www.example.com and example.com as two different websites. So, unless you tell them specifically that the two websites are the same by redirecting one to the other, you will split all your SEO authority between the two domains. It really doesn’t matter whether you prefer to use www or not, just choose one of them as default and redirect the links on the other format to this default. It’s fairly simple. In case of website building platforms like WordPress, the process is as simple as indicating your choice by selecting one of them from the dropdown menu. Search engines will now redirect all the traffic from the alternate domain format to the default domain.
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