Are You Damaging Your Rankings?

Is your SEO ranking not going up despite your efforts? There’s a chance that you might be ruining your chances.

Almost all website owners exhaust all SEO means to rank up and to earn money from their pages. So when something goes wrong and their rankings go downhill, it’s easy to assume that they are doing something that damages the rankings.

Remember: good SEO practices can be difficult, while bad ones are easy to fall prey to.

So are you ruining your rankings? Assess if you’re doing any of these:

*You resort to spammy content

The bad thing about some website owners is they use spammy content for the sake of gaining backlinks and organic traffic.

One notorious spot here is the comment section. Many brands and website owners post links of their pages that are not relevant to the thread, let alone the topic.

If you do this spammy practice, you’re damaging your Disqus account and the site will block you using an anti-spam plugin.

*You duplicate your content

Duplicate content is a no-no when it comes to SEO. Plagiarized content never goes unnoticed on the web, much so by web crawlers which index your pages.

It’s indeed quite challenging to write something that’s 100% unique. In fact, Raven Tools conducted a web crawl where they discovered that about 29% of 200 million pages actually contain 29% duplicated content.

Of course, you can’t have a purely original copy since the vast world of the internet will use the same words. What you have to abide with is the definition of Google of ‘duplicate content’.

*Your keyword stuffing is rampant

Keyword stuffing is one of the common faux pas of newbie website owners.

SEO plugins like Yoast recommend that each copy contains at least 0.5% keyword density. Meanwhile, it still tolerates up to 1%.

However, many website owners think that this is a numbers game. The higher the percentage is, the more edge they get.

This is awfully wrong for one big reason: keyword stuffing.

Aside from being penalized by Google, keyword stuffing also makes your content unappealing to readers.

The rule of thumb here is to integrate your keywords as natural as possible. Don’t overkill the optimization.

*You use too many H1 headers

This may seem harmless, but using too many H1 headers will also damage your rankings.

You should know that H1 headers are reserved for the main heading alone. Peppering your pages and posts with this header will confuse crawlers and give your SEO a big disservice.

So the rule of thumb is to use just one H1 header on your website. The rest can be in H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 as it merits the hierarchy.

* You’re placing too many ads above-fold

Like newspapers, web pages also have an above-fold part. It’s the visible portion that internet users see without scrolling.

Placing ad banners here will have a huge blow on your rankings. Soon enough, you’ll notice a decrease in traffic as more and more site visitors get put off by your pesky ads.

The key here is to check the page layout algorithm. It will give you an idea about what you’re doing wrong with the ad placements.