The 4 Worst SEO Mistakes - How Can You Fix Them?

When it comes to organic SEO on your website, there are elements that can help your rankings and elements that can hinder them. If you're vying for the top spot, you certainly don't want anything that's going to stop that from happening on your site.

So, what are the elements that hurt your site and how can you fix them? If you read our article, you'll be able to find out for yourself.

Avoiding keyword stuffing

There's a difference between writing quality content and keyword stuffing. Your content needs to make sense both to Google and to your customers; if you are writing and re-writing text so that it has the keyword "plumber" in, then you'll struggle to rank. Google will know exactly what you're doing - trying to stuff as many keywords into a piece of text as possible - and will penalise you for it.

Using online tools such as Addme.com or Live Keyword Analysis will really help you be able to study the keyword density per page. Make your writing sound natural and you won't have to worry about being penalised, just target your keyword and location on every page.

Speed up your website

Making sure that your website is easy to load, whether it's the Home page or page to page, is critical. Not only is this important for the customers visiting your site - as many potential customers won't stay on your site if it takes a while to load - but for Google as well. Almost half of online users will click away from your site if it doesn't load within 3 seconds.

PageSpeed Insights from Google is a fantastic tool to help you see how fast your site loads and why it might be a little slower than average. Thus, fixing these issues will help you make your website load faster and keep customers on it.

Make your site responsive

Having a responsive site in this day and age is crucial. The amount of people using mobiles or tablets to browse is higher than ever and by having an unresponsive site you may be turning away a large part of your audience. It's easy to check whether your site is responsive or not with tools such as Screenfly; you can check the size of your screen and take note of how easy it is to view your website on different kinds of mobiles and tablets.

Deal with any technical problems

It's important to get rid of any technical problems your website might have as soon as possible, as if Google crawls your site and sees errors, it will begin to push your SEO rankings down. If the errors are dealt with swiftly, then Google won't notice, but if you leave them to linger than it definitely will. This not only includes errors on your website, but errors with your hosting as well. At Smart Domain Group, our hosting package ensures that your site will stay up and, if an error does occur, it is dealt with quickly and efficiently.

A good way to tell if your website is down or not is Down For Everyone or Just Me; if you find it is down for everyone then you'll need to contact the company your website is hosted with. If it's not, then there could be an issue with your computer.

So, what does that mean for my website?

To ensure that you're not being penalised for any little mistakes, it's a good idea to check through your website for the points above. This isn't an exhaustive list, but a very good starting point. Make sure to check through your website as often as you can to ensure that nothing mentioned in this article is occurring.

Once you've done that, you can move on to adding quality content, guest posts and ensuring that you're targeting the correct keywords.