5 things that can hurt the Search Engine Ranking Positions of your website

I have always been telling you guys what to do with SEO of your website. I finally decided to go on and explain the things that can actually hurt your website’s Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs). And how you can avoid those to make your ranking stable. I will be targetting the solutions toward most of the bloggers, but other website owners can benefit from it also.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is like a infection on your site that starts out slowly, but it can literally kill the search engine ranking position of the entire site. What is duplicate content. Basically when you have the same content on two or more pages of your website. The common example, I gave with blogs was the Archive Pages. Most people fall in the habit of keeping archive pages on the site, but they don’t deindex those pages through your robot.txt. Alot of people like to keep the archive pages for the resource of their users, if you are one of those people you should do the following:

Open your Robot.txt and add Disallow: /archives/, and that should fix your problem.

Another suggestion I gave away a few weeks back was to use summaries instead of posting your entire posts on the main page, and write custom summaries. I do that often, but not always. Read the 3 common ways to avoid duplicate content with Blogs here.

Non-Search Engine Friendly URLs

Dynamic URLs while work well with the script, but you need to make those urls search engine friendly. What do I mean by Non-Search Engine Friendly URLs? Urls that ends with xxx.com/index.php?p=23. A link of that sort is considered non-seo friendly. A preferred structure of the link would be xxx.com/category/file.html or xxx.com/category/file/. Now for new bloggers who often get confused because they see, WordPress have 3 options in the wordpress default, and the other field say custom. They go on to just pick the one because they don’t want to mess up the script. In reality you won’t mess up anything if you change the right Permalink structure in wordpress. I have written a tutorial about How to change WordPress URLs to make it more SEO Friendly. Also another common mistakes users make is when trasnferring their sites, or pointing to another domain they use 302 redirect. The correct technique they should use is 301 re-direct which is considered more seo friendly. (I will explain how to do this in my next post)

Abusing the title tags

I remember recommending everyone to use the title tag on their website. But this tag is very vulnerable and can easily be abused. So the overuse or underuse of this feature can harm your SERPs. Now what do you I mean by abusing this feature. If I start adding Balkhis at the end of each title to make my ranking for Balkhis strong can actually harm my site. Underuse, is when people don’t even use it. A trick of using and abusing this is make the titles relevant to that page, and don’t stuff extra keywords in them.

Same Meta Tags on every page

This is one of the worst things you can do to your website by keeping the same meta tags. Change it up. Make the meta tags related to that specific page. Change the meta keywords and make it related to that page. It becomes a pain for those who are not using any script to manage their content. But often people using WordPress are either unaware of this feature, or are just too lazy. The worst group I have seen who do this alot are directory owners. Having 800 categories from a category dump, these guys don’t bother adding any meta description to any category, so one default meta description goes onto all their categories which makes the few big directories stand out.

WordPress fellas, you guys need to start adding meta descriptions, and keywords in all of your posts. You can’t do that with just wordpress. You need All in one SEO Pack which is a free plugin. This will give you an option when you are writing the post to use this to change the meta information than normal. Do it to all of your posts if you are not doing it right now.

Look vs. content

Often times I see that alot of users are just focused on how good their website look, not how good the content is. I dont know how many of you all heard the phrase Content is King around the SEO World. Content is very important part of your website, and often times the look of the website distracts the owner. Also sometimes the designer doesn’t make the design SEO Friendly because he thought it couldn’t be done the other way and still look pretty. Another mistake people make is Completely Flash Website. If you are using a complete flash website, How on earth will a bot read the content on your website.

Flash website owners should have some sort of .xml file that allows the bot to read the content. For all the other website owners, they need to realize that content is the most important thing that determines their SERPs.

I hope none of you are doing these 5 things, and if you are then you must stop right now before your website suffer some more.