A bad website can ruin your SEO

The basic function of SEO is to help position your website well in the search engines’ results pages in order to drive more targeted traffic through to your site. This is done through a variety of off-site SEO activities including social media marketing, link building, content marketing and more. A great off-site SEO campaign will develop a strong link portfolio that uses a variety of quality sources to drive traffic. But the best white hat link building campaign in the world won’t help your SEO if your site doesn’t match up.

Here are 5 factors on your site that could be hindering your SEO success:

Ads, ads, ads…ads

As a site owner, you have every right to monetize your site. But there is a point where your site becomes more of a giant banner ad than an actual site. A lot of ads can make your site look very spammy and push out any quality content you may have.

Broken links

There is nothing more frustrating for a site visitor than running into a 404 error at every turn. Broken links not only detract from the overall user-experience (which will send your visitors out as fast as they came in), but you could also incur a penalty from the search engines because of them. If you delete an old page, make sure you redirect any links that pointed to it towards another, related page. This is especially important if you launch a new site. New domains have little established trust with the search engines and it could take years to rebuild that link portfolio. Don’t let those links go to waste!

Slow load time

Google willingly admits that site speed and page load time is incredibly important factor in their ranking algorithm. Visitors aren’t willing to sit there and wait for your site to load. Advancements in technology have trained users to expect instantaneous results online, so patience runs thin. If it takes more than a few seconds to load, most visitors won’t bother to stick around to find out what your site have to offer.

Too much fluff

Visitors to your site want to find the information they are looking for and they want to find it right away.  Believe or not, there is no word count minimum or maximum you have to abide by when writing webpage content. Don’t stuff your pages with fluff just to make it look like you’re actually saying something. Visitors don’t care! They don’t want to dig for the information they want/need. Keep it simple and straightforward.

Outdated information

Let’s say you ran a Christmas BOGO special for your e-commerce site. Guess what? It’s summer. Do you still have information about that Christmas special on your site? It makes you look like a lazy site owner and could even call your trust factor into question. If you can’t be bothered to update your website with the correct information, why should visitor bother sticking around?

There are numerous other factors that could be hampering the success of your SEO that actually have nothing to do with your off-site SEO activities. That is why it is so important to make sure you have a fully optimized site before beginning your link building campaign. While links are the bread and butter of SEO, it doesn’t matter how many quality links you have pointing towards your site is your site can’t convert. Make sure that your site is worthy of your SEO!

/Daily Seo Tip/