5 SEO No-No’s for the New Year

Everyone wants to get to the top of the list of the great Google. There are many things you could do to increase your chances of ranking on page one, but let’s look at 5 things you shouldn’t do. These thing will cause your ranking to drop so try best to avoid them.

1. Cloaking

Showing search engines one thing and site visitors another is known as cloaking. Using sneaky redirects or custom coding to trick the bots is not good practice. No one wants to click a search result expecting one thing and get redirected to something totally off topic.

2. Purchasing Links

Never buy links to your site. This does not refer to niche directories. Those would be considered quality links. Link farms, or sites just full of links to any and everything, should be avoided. You are judged by the company you keep, so make sure your links are coming from quality sites, not catch all link exchange sites.

3. Duplicate Content

Write your own, original content. If you run two websites, always change up your writing. Search engines want to know where the original, quality content came from. Don’t make it hard for them by duplicating your content.

4. Slow Server

You click a search result and the site doesn’t load. How disappointed are you?! No one wants that to happen. If your site is slow loading or experiencing outages, fix it! Ask to be moved to a new server or find a new hosting company.

5. Hidden Text

This also refers to microscopic text. Do not make your font color the same as your background color and stuff it with keywords. Do not make your font so small that human eyes can’t read it with a magnifying glass. Never put anything on your site solely for the search bots. All text should be readable and understandable to both bots and visitors. Make your content legible and visible and everyone will be happy.