Making all the right steps to improve success online can seem daunting to those who are entering the world of online sales. The realm of ecommerce and online funneling comes with lingo and jargon that can easily confuse someone trying to start off on the right foot. Although it can be a lot, ensuring that you are effectively planning and executing your online marketing strategy is an absolute must for anyone who depends on search rankings for success. Even the littlest of mistakes can have a major effect on search engine rankings. But what small SEO hiccups can cause major effects. Here are some of the most common mistakes in national SEO strategies!
Automatically Generated Content
Ah, APIs are great to pull social information from your various social accounts, but when used to pull from other site’s feeds, this can be seen as a large amount of duplicate content by Google. When APIs pull this content on your website, it generates a page on your site. If you do not have a No-Follow Tag associated with the page that has the API information, you may be creating hundreds of pages with duplicate content which is a no-go from Google. Be sure that all pages that are pulling duplicate content have these tags and focus on creating your own content!
Crawl & Indexing Issues
There is a file associated with your website called the robots.txt file. This is a master file of your website. If you are adding tags, be absolutely certain you are putting this tag in the correct location (if you are concerned about where this is, contact your web developer). Adding “Disallow/” to your site incorrectly will cause your entire website to be uncrawlable by Google meaning your website cannot or will be poorly indexed by Google’s algorithm.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword phrases are great tools, but the days of plopping a three word phrase onto every single page of your website can and will cause problems with the Google Penguin update. Google is enforcing the strong idea of generating and curation original, helpful content for consumers. Putting these words into the content makes it seem unnatural and placed specifically for boosting rankings, which the algorithm can and will see.
No Redirects
Did you build a new website, change a URL or add an additional URL that points to your website? Guess what? By doing this you have created an all new set of URLs pointing to your site and Google will see one of these pages as duplicate content that can cause a penalty. 301 redirects are a must, especially when changing domains as your old links will point to a non-existant domain unless changed.
This seems like a lot, but luckily there are experts that can work with and assist your business with their SEO strategy with ease. Learn more about Atria and how they can boost your business’ online success today.