Top SEO Factors That Could Hurt Really Bad
Web pages very rarely rank in the search results from doing almost nothing to them. If you are in a competitive space in the search results you will want to conduct some sort of link building campaign and internal website tweaks in order to drive power & authority to your website. It is important to realize that if you do a great deal more of link building than you might normally you won’t speed anything up and you might just hurt yourself rather than help your Google rankings.
Here are some of the most important factors that affect your Google search rankings:
Keyword Stuffing: It is very easy to want to get the keyword stuff bug for your website. You assume more keywords jammed into your web pages will create better rankings and this is not the right approach to take when optimizing a website. Keyword stuffing could actually cause you to lose power with your website and acquire a search engine penalty causing your rankings to tank quickly.
Excessive Javascript: Search engines really don’t like javascript, so it is important to keep it to a minimum. A header or maybe your website navigation is fine but make sure to fight back with a nice amount of optimized content. There are many claims out there that search engines are starting to read javascript but the reality is that they really are not reading it that well.
Frames: Using frames on your website is a sure fire way to kill your SEO efforts. Search engine spiders cannot read the frames well at all and your website shows up as one page which defeats the purpose of what you are trying to accomplish with your search engine optimization efforts.
Changing Content: If you are hyper and you are always changing your content this is also bad for search engine optimization. You need to be able to let your web pages gain some age strength and if you are always changing your content you will not be able to take advantage of that age factor on your content. Tweaks and changes are ok but large sweeping rewrites are not going to help your long term goal of developing authority in the search engines.
Bad Links: It is tough to gauge when you might link to another website that might be linking to a bad network of links but it is important to use your best judgment when seeking out links for your website. If they look like they might be linking to spammy websites try staying away from the website entirely. The link might sound nice but it could hurt your SEO power over time. Remember you are trying to grow your authority in the search engines and that only happens when you link to other authoritative websites.
Interlinking: Interlinking pages of your website is good for many reasons. The first SEO factor is great because it allows you to hyperlink text to other important pages of your website strengthening your internal search engine optimization factors. From a user and website conversion experience it is great for your web visitor. If you have a blog that is connected with your website you can all of a sudden link to service pages within your blog without any risk of penalties, assuming it is done tastefully.
Poor or Weak Meta Info: I sometimes come across websites that are using 60 or 70 of the 160 allowed characters for a meta tag description. This completely under cuts your SEO efforts. Utilize your entire available meta info area and focus on maximizing that space in order to optimize your inbound marketing efforts.
These are just some of the most important factors that you should put into consideration whenever you marketing a business or website. Most people assume they just need millions of links in order to get the job done right. This way of thinking couldn’t be further from the truth. Taking a tasteful quality approach is the way to do it.
25 Responses to “Top SEO Factors That Could Hurt Really Bad”
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For weak meta tags, isn’t it important to keep titles under 70 to be readable for click-throughs from clients? I know there are some aspects where you want to use the full 160 bit others where you want it to make sense, have keywords, but also be under 70 to show fully in google.
Thoughts? Good article thou, I enjoyed it.
Thats interesting about the Bots, Im sure over time they can read more. Do you think plain HTML sites will be unheard of in the near future?
Hi Kristi,
Thanks for reading. Yes the title page aspect should be concise and well optimized (70 characters is about right).
I agree on some points with what has bees said here. there is however the situation where people do backlinking wrong by creating too many in one day, each day, for days in a row. Backlinking needs to look more natural and less automated. I have found that probably about 30 a day is the absolute max before google will sandbox a site. Also, in order for those links to actaully assist in your seo and not dtract from it the links MUST be from niche relevent sites. De-linking also will see serps take a dive just as fast as they were attained
Hi Keith,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts! Great point! I could have easily put the recommendation of poor link building strategy as another top SEO factor on this list as a key area to look at as well.
A good ranking in Google is desirable to help bring more visitors to your pages. However, there are no secrets to higher ranking in the search engines as much of the work can be done on your own. Taking a little time every day or at least every week to work on your website content to keep it fresh and updated to contain words searchers are using to locate you is a great start. Providing good information about your area of expertise will also be helpful.
Hi Zermic,
Thanks for reading and leaving your comment. So very true sometimes people do think that there is this SEO magic or some sort of secret in order to do well long term. Providing good information and a great visitor experience is essential as well.
Internal link building is a great advice. I also recommend it and have always tried to help the readers by adding some links to the other pages of the blog or site.
On the other hand it helps the ranking of your keywords, specially if it’s supported by some inbound links. All it takes is to conduct some more link building by article marketing, comment marketing and so on to make search engines sure that this keyphrase is of high popularity on the web.
Hi Website Promotion Blog,
Thanks for reading and your comment.
This is good solid SEO advice, I appreciate you sharing it with our readers…thanks again!
I was just inside Google Webmaster tools when I received this post in e-mail…
One of the issues one of the websites has (according to Google) – are short meta descriptions. They of course do not exactly specify what is the problem. Meanwhile I tried, without any success, to have the meta descriptions anywhere from 40 to 160 characters.
The problem is though that Google has been ignoring 90% of the time the meta descriptions- while their way to get the “snippet” is darn good. So I decided to experiment and to completely remove the meta descriptions form the site.
However, Nick, I would really love if you could expand on meta descriptions and best practices using those.
Hi Nick,
Thank you for another great article…it is definitely appreciated.
Regarding link-building, we have done a TON of research in this area. Our findings have proven that what is most important to help your website rank higher in search results is who links IN to your site and not necessarily who your site links OUT to. In general the more inbound links you have to your site that are relevant, one-way and DO FOLLOW, the higher your site will rank in search results.
However, you are correct that you need to be very careful in who you link OUT to from your website. While these outbound links won’t necessarily help your website rise in search results, they can definitely cause your website to drop in rankings. Even worse, if you are hazardous in your outbound linking, the links could even get your website banned from search results.
Thanks again, and keep up the good work!
Tom
Hi Vlad,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.
So many people decide not to include a meta tag description because “Google ignores it”. As a best practice, I ALWAYS recommend having a well written and unique meta tag description for each page of a website. The meta tag description should be a summary of the content on the page. At least 50% of the time the meta tag description shows up in the Google search results (and most of the time in Yahoo! and Bing). Also besides SEO, the meta tag description can help deliver the message to your visitor searching to help improve the CTR of a page of your website that is positioned in the search engines.
Thanks again for reading and your comment!
A great post thanks
I also believe that continued steady building or adding of themed content helps in rankings. If you use google analytics, you can look at the keywords that send you organic traffic and add content optimised for those individual keywords. Optimizing a page per keyword is some times better and easier than for 2 keywords so I tend to do 1 KW 1 article.
I think backlink building is still king
Thanks for a great post
Thanks Nick,
In my particular case it is a online store. Unfortunately Google does not do a good job as far as differentiating pages featuring products say sorted by price, it always gives me bunch of “HTML suggestions” as far as that goes.
As far as meta descriptions go not sure if Google is trying to say “your meta description is to short” or “your meta description is no good” – go figure. We are getting decent conversions as it is but would always take more
. Thanks again!
Great conversation going on here in the comments. SEO debates are great to take part in as it helps us unlock the keys to Google. Great information on link building. I will try to stick to a max of 30 a day.
Thanks Vlad…more conversions is always the name of the game!
Thanks William and Kelly for reading and your comment!
Thanks Nick,
There’s surely a bit of a balance to be struck on content changes.
We are told to keep site content fresh for search engines to encourage Google to spider more often etc. We have certainly noticed our own site moving up after we have made content changes after a while of none. Coincidence – possibly but we suspect not….
Hi Dave,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and example…Fresh content is very important, but it should/must be natural and not forced (content just for SEO), content should be for your visitors…
Thanks again for your comment!
To my understanding, Nick says, that the page content should not be completely re-written, but to add something is okay. Just think of a blog. You write a new blog post, if something new on your subject is coming up. On a web-page you can add it on the bottom or with a link and make a new page.
Well, I just guess so.
Hi Christa,
Exactly, developing new content with a purpose is always essential, with natural optimization after is key as well. Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Thanks, Nick.
I’m sure you hear it all of the time, but your insights on SEO are so invaluable and appreciated.
I always look forward to your updates and really like the new look you’ve been implementing.
Thanks again!
Hi LM Stamper,
Thanks for reading and your kind words! I am happy to help!
very nice read,
Google is all about the quality,
so in the end just use common sense and build a nice website/blog
Hi Nick,
thanks for the advice on interlinking. As a relative newbie to SEO (handling only our site), I think this is a simple thing i can tackle right away.
Hi Doreen,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. Many times there are simple and basic things with an on site SEO perspective that can have a big benefit and help…thanks again for your comment!