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TOP SEO Mistakes

There is no perfect SEO strategy and opinions differ on what is most important. However, certain mistakes will certainly hurt your website SEO wise:

  • Duplicate content - may get penalties and content will not rank. Instead, redirect to existing content and write variants of the text that will register on their own, if you must use nofollow links
  • Not using SEO Friendly URLs - not only do you lose opportunity to include keywords in the url but egines will actually index your website slower if they realize it is a dynamic website
  • Moving whole domain without redirecting - when you get a new domain, you get a temporary boost for fresh content but you lose all the reputation that your website has built including all backlinks and traffic associated with it. Make sure you at least redirect from the old content to new content (and preferrably transferring to corresponding pages and not a simple homepage redirect for all pages)
  • Moving pages around within a website without redirecting - For many reasons, pages tend to move around due to the dynamic nature of the web. Make sure the people do not end up in a 404 when you move content around. Not only will people appreciate the redirect but it will help your rankings.
  • Not Adding fresh content - by adding content on a regular basis, visitors are encouraged to come back... even engines love new content
  • No descriptive tags - title/ meta tags though they may appear less useful than before are used 
  • No sitemap - sitemaps make everyone's life easier and help engines index your content faster. Make sure you submit them too.
  • Not having a way to retain the visitors - mailing lists, social network presence are a good way to make sure you can contact the users later
  • Preview search results - Different engines will use different algorithms to figure out how to present your data... make sure you preview your pages in search results and social networks like facebook
  • Have the domain offline - Have at least one page, preferrably with target content