If there’s one element of digital marketing that only seems to get more complex every year, it’s SEO. These days, trying to not tank your website’s ranking can often feel like you’re walking on a never-ending tightrope. Go overboard with optimization and you get penalized, but do nothing, and algorithm updates will still trip you up, somehow.
Thankfully, most SEO errors are easily recognized and corrected, but some of them can have long-term consequences that you want to avoid. It’s unfortunate because often, these problems arise out of your intentions to do a good job. You really need to be extra cautious and in this article, we’ll look at three mistakes to be aware of and avoid.
#1. Prioritize Quality Instead of Quantity in Link Building
Talk to any expert in SEO and they’ll agree that link building is one of the most important aspects to manage. However, it’s a shame that so many businesses waste their time and effort chasing quantity in terms of links. The fact is, quality is so much more consequential and by the time businesses learn this, the damage is already done.
What’s more, if you’ve invested heavily into link building on random sites across the internet, trying to undo the process is messy and complex. Moreover, recent developments only promise to make the situation worse. The disavow tool, a method of denying connection with spammy links, might be on its way out.
Search Engine Land notes that Google’s official position is for you to contact website owners if you want to have links removed. If that doesn’t work out, then use the disavow tool. However, this may get tricky soon as John Mueller, a senior search analyst at Google, recently said that they’d remove it at some point.
If that happens, you’re going to be left at the mercy of the website admins. Trying to get low-quality, spammy sites to take down your links is going to be a nightmare for most people. It’s possible that the only way to make it happen is to pay them for their effort. Thus, save yourself the trouble and focus your energy on quality link-building from the get-go.
#2. Remember to Focus on Site Load Speed
There are some who believe that page speed isn’t as much of a factor anymore. This seems to have started after people noticed that Google removed the “page experience” as one of the ranking systems. However, after analysis, Search Engine Journal confirms that Google still views page speed as a ranking factor.
That’s not surprising in the least. This is a factor that is never going to be irrelevant when it comes to website traffic. Page load times have a direct and obvious link to user experience that is undeniable. Modern AI-built websites often ensure that rich media content like animations and interactive elements are compressed and that caching is handled with efficiency. This is why you see the growing trend of businesses choosing to use AI-powered website builders.
Why spend hours trying to optimize code while building a website when AI can do it just as well or better? Efficiency is key and with the way things are looking, AI is quickly beating us in that department. Thus, it begs the question. How fast should your page actually load? Well, Hocoos notes that you want to aim for a load time of not more than 2 seconds. However, if you can make it faster, do so by all means. Every millisecond counts.
Thankfully, there are plenty of strategies and techniques that you can use to make websites more effective. These include minimizing HTTP requests, using more browser cache, and using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, which can give you suggestions to improve load speed.
#3. Make Good Use of 301 Redirects
301 redirects sound like something tax-related, but they are actually critical if you want to maintain your ‘link equity.’ That refers to the authority that your website builds over time from quality inbound links.
Ahrefs explains that 301 redirects are used to tell the browser that a page has permanently moved to a different location. It also provides the new location and redirects visitors to the new address. The most common method to use 301 redirects is via editing the “.htaccess” file that should exist in your site’s root folder.
When you fail to use 301 redirects, the visitor may see 404 errors where the link leads to a “page not found” message. You might have experienced these errors before and know how frustrating they can be.
Moreover, there will be times when you need to clean up your website. Times when you need to take down and re-upload pages or sometimes redo massive sections of your website content. It’s in these moments that 301 redirects can be a lifesaver and not undo years of link-building efforts.
All things considered, just as good SEO practices can drastically boost your traffic, a few untimely oversights also have the potential to tank it. It’s undeniably a tricky skill to master, but if you can keep an eye on things, you won’t regret it. As with best practices in any niche, it’s always better to prevent than to respond to a crisis.