Are You Guilty of These Bad SEO Practices?

If you’re a website owner, you’ve probably performed various SEO methods to rank your pages. It’s necessary to map your website on the internet. However, some practices which may seem harmless may ruin your rankings.

If you notice a sudden decline in traffic, you should assess your practices right away. There’s a chance that you might be doing something wrong that causes a decrease in traffic of your pages.

The sad truth here is it’s easy to fall prey on bad SEO practices. So before it’s too late, you should watch out for the following mistakes:

*Publishing duplicate content

When it comes to duplicate content, we have to consider what Google considers as ‘duplicate’ or ‘plagiarized’.

According to the search engine, duplicate content is “appreciably similar or completely matching blocks of content that exist in more than one place on the web”.

You should know that it’s difficult to write 100% unique copy since there are millions of pages on the internet using the same language and talking about the same thing.

So how can you avoid duplicate content? Always adhere to Google’s definition.

*Using spammy content

Spammy content always gets penalized by Google. Some of the examples here are commenting unrelated links or information within a thread, content with excessively repetitive strings of words, and other low-quality content.

Spamming is a desperate tactic. However, some website owners are paying copywriters and social media managers to do this for the sake of gaining traffic regardless of its quality.

When you do this, you’re ruining your Disqus account and you’ll be blocked on the other sites you’re sending or posting spammy content.

*Placing more than one H1 header

The rule of thumb in using H1 headers is to use it once on your whole website. Remember that H1 headers are reserved for the main header only – nothing else. The rest should be in H2 to H6 depending on the necessary hierarchy.

Using more than one H1 header will be a negative point to web crawlers. Also, it will impact your SEO rankings.

*Saturating your above-fold with ads

The above-fold part of your website is the visible part without scrolling. If you place too many ads here, you’ll likely experience a sudden decline in traffic.

Aside from Google frowning on this practice, your site visitors will be put off by too many ads, much so for pop-ups.

Besides, you’re supposed to follow the page layout algorithm to prevent any penalties or adverse effects on your website.

Just imagine yourself visiting someone else’s website. Will you be happy to be inundated with ad banners?

*You resort to keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the mistake of optimizing a certain keyword beyond the recommended keyword density.

Usually, a keyword density of 0.5% is the rule of thumb. Some can go to as much as 1%. However, anything beyond this is already keyword stuffing.

Google will penalize your website and your readers will find your content unappealing. Can you imagine repeating the same string of words five times within a three-sentence paragraph?

To prevent this, integrate your keywords naturally in your content. If it’s off to read, edit it accordingly.