6 Things Not To Do On Your Website For SEO

When SEO is discussed, most of the conversation surrounds link building and off site SEO. Don’t get us wrong, link building is incredibly important to the success of any SEO campaign however on site SEO, i.e. the SEO best practices that you do or don’t follow on your actual website has the power to make or break the success of your SEO campaign. So, in this article we are going to lay out, simply, the six things you should not do on your website if you want it to succeed and be ranked highly for those lucrative high quality keywords.

1. Keyword stuffing
   Keyword stuffing is the act of cramming the keyword(s) you want your website to rank for countless times into the paragraphs of your site, in an unnatural manner. I understand why you would want to do this, as you want the search engines to know that this keyword is important and you want to rank highly for it, but unfortunately, stuffing the keyword you want to rank for many times in the paragraphs of your site will have the opposite effect. In short; keyword stuffing is routinely penalized by the worlds major search engines.
2. Not Using Image ALT Tags
   Images are often neglected when people build their sites but ignoring your sites images is a huge mistake. Search engines crawl and index images just as much as they do text content. So if your site has perfectly SEO edited content but the images have been neglected then you risk your site not ranking as highly as it should.
   Author’s Note: If you want to be found by more readers and get more website traffic, try out LinkCollider. It is primarily a site that helps you get followers and likes for your social media sites but it can also bring traffic to your site and help with your SEO strategy.
3. Not Using H1 Tags
   This is a big one and thankfully is an easy one to remedy. If you don’t use proper H1 tags and to a lesser extent H2, H3 and H4 tags then you risk your site not ranking as highly as it could in the major search engines.
4. Having thin content
   What we mean by “thin content” are pages with little to offer the reader and little value in general. Search engines have gotten a lot smarter over the years so pages with a few lines of text and a badly chosen picture just won’t cut it, no matter how many backlinks the site has.
5. Not having long form content
   Long form content rules the web. If you don’t believe us, do an online search on almost anything and you will find that the pages that are the longest often rank the highest. So having pages on your site that are short, as well as thin (discussed above) is a sure fire way of ensuring that your site won’t be ranked as highly as you want it to be.
6. Having a slow website
   The search engines care about speed, a lot. So, if you don’t invest in proper hosting and image compression you can be sure that your site will not be ranked as highly as it could and should be. It is no coincidence that the fastest sites are often ranked the highest on the major search engines.