As a follow-up to our last article, Are You Making These SEO Mistakes? – Part 1, we thought we’d post a follow up with more ideas of SEO mistakes you could be making on your website:
Your Links Are Broken
If you’ve ever linked to another website on your own (which by the way you should be doing), then there’s an excellent chance that at least one broken link exists on your website – probably more! This is a normal occurrence, given that it’s pretty common for people to either change the URL on certain pages of their site or even change domain names. Meanwhile, the old link is still sitting on your site, not receiving any click-throughs because it now leads nowhere.
You might be thinking, oh well, too bad for them! But don’t forget, it’s bad for you as well because Google will see your site as being unreliable if it houses broken links. And yes, you guessed it: this will reflect negatively in the search rankings.
It’s a good idea once in awhile to check for broken links on your website and fix or remove them. Dead Link Checker is a good free tool you can use for this.
It’s a good idea to check your backlinks.
No One Is Linking To Your Site
You can build the most beautiful website and produce the most compelling content the world has ever seen, but if other websites aren’t sharing it by linking to your site on theirs, you won’t enjoy as much SEO success as you should.
Backlinks are a form of off-page optimisation, meaning it’s an SEO tactic that’s done outside of your own website. Google considers backlinks to be an excellent indicator of authority: i.e. if your website is linked to on many other websites, particularly ones of high domain authority, it must mean that your website is of high authority as well. It’s a way of validating the quality of your website.
You can use Moz’s OSE tool to check your own domain authority and any existing backlinks to your website. Ideally you want to grow your collection of backlinks over time because this will help boost your domain authority and hence rise in Google’s search rankings.
The #1 way to do this? Consistently post quality content that people want to share. Then, seek out other sites that are relevant to yours and approach them to see if they’d be willing to link to your website, either by referencing an article you’ve already written for your site or by posting an original article written by you on their website which links to yours (in the blogging world, we call this a “guest post”).
You’re Keyword Stuffing
Ok, so you’ve done your keyword research and know which keywords you’d like to optimise your site for. Great!
Please, please, please don’t go inserting those keywords anywhere and everywhere across your website. It’s absolutely crucial that your site content reads naturally and provides a pleasant user experience. If one of your keywords is “SEO agency Melbourne” and you add that to a sentence, it’s grammatically incorrect.
Equally as bad is inserting a keyword too many times on one page – i.e. keyword stuffing. Google is smart enough to detect this and will assume that you are unnaturally referencing that keyword if it appears more than a reasonable number of times on one page. There’s no hard and fast rule for keyword density, so our best advice is to keep your keyword references natural and consider switching them up from time to time if you’ve referenced the same one a lot more than others.