Five Ways to Kill Your Search Engine Ranking

1. Using Duplicate Content There are lots of SEO mistakes that are easy to make, but you should have no trouble avoiding this one- don’t use duplicate content! One of the best ways to squash your organic search ranking is to fail to provide high quality, and original content. Copying other bloggers’, or other websites’, content can make your site lose a great deal of value and dilute the value of original information that you are supplying.

2. Allowing Lengthy Loading Speeds Even an extra one or two seconds can negatively impact your standing with search engines. Remember, search engine titans like Google put a lot of emphasis on user experience and faster sites create happier users. Aim for load times under four seconds.

3. Writing Content for Search Engines Instead of Humans Sometimes people get overzealous with their use of SEO and keywords so that the content is no longer useful to visitors. While it can be tempting to try to use a lot of SEO, keep in mind that it is possible to overoptimize and negatively impact your ratings. Too many keywords reduce the value of your content and contributes to a poor user experience.

4. Failure to Use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools Google has tons of sites to crawl, why not make it easier, and simultaneously make certain that Google is aware of your existence? Using Google Analytics and other Google Webmaster Tools is a sure-fire way to make the search engine aware of your existence, and provide really great insight into who your site is reaching and how effectively.

5. Dead Links are All Over the Place You should evaluate your site regularly to make sure that all navigation links are live, and that if you are linking to any other sites that these, too, are active. Avoid using dynamic links that can break over time, and fix dead links when you find them. Leaving dead links on your site can make it incredibly frustrating for visitors to navigate, and search engine crawlers will notice, lowering your overall ranking.

Creating, maintaining, and optimizing a website can be hard work. With all the nuance of Google and other search engine’s algorithms, it can be difficult to stay up-to-date on your material and to make your website easily searchable. If you need some guidance in the process, get in touch with the web gurus at Ad House. We offer consultations as well as a website evaluation tool that can find broken links and identify other strengths and weaknesses. We want to see you succeed online through integrated solutions, and we are always happy to share some of the knowledge we’ve gathered, so don’t hesitate to get in touch!