Unless you want to pay for all the traffic which visits your website, you must have an effective SEO strategy to improve your search engine ranking and thus generate free traffic. If you plan to implement this yourself, you must avoid some of the most basic and damaging mistakes that can seriously harm your website’s chances of being ranked well.
- Using ‘Black-Hat’ Tricks
For every SEO technique which Google and the other search engines accept and welcome, there is one which tries to ‘game the system’. These black hat methods may bring some short-term improvement to your ranking but in the long term, they will only serve to damage your site. It can even be blacklisted altogether meaning it will never rank.
Don’t be tempted by dodgy shortcuts, and instead practice sound, well-established SEO techniques. They may take longer to work, but they will mean your website is safe, with the added bonus being you are not constantly worried about being caught out.
- Website Overload
Whilst lots of photos, images, audio and video may make it seem you are giving your visitors the best experience possible, it can lead to the opposite of what you planned. Lots of media files mean your website and its pages can take a considerable time to load. This can mean visitors clicking away as they don’t have the time or the patience to wait.
Not only will you lose these visitors, your website’s ranking will be damaged as the search engines consider load times, and measure how long each visitor remains on a website.