Search engine optimization still feels like a big mystery. When your website is ranking well, it’s nerve wracking to make changes – for good reason. The wrong choices can destroy the rankings you’ve achieved. Below are five easy ways to blow your rankings.
- Ignore the site.
Continual additions of keyword-rich website content keep the search engines happy. It doesn’t work to achieve good rankings and then allow the site to grow stagnant. By constantly adding new pages, you will keep the engines indexing your site and they will rank it higher.
- Replace text with images or flash.
Search engines can’t read text when it’s embedded inside graphics or flash animations. Keep website copy, including navigation butters, as text and the engines will continue to read them.
- List your site on disreputable sites.
There are countless services that promise to build the links back to your website for you, to save you the time and trouble of building your link popularity. Unfortunately, these services, and link exchange programs, just land your links on disreputable sites. If they are just link lists, or even if they have content that is irrelevant to the subject matter on your website, these links can do more harm than good. Too many of them can drop your rankings. Spend the time to develop relevant links and your rankings will benefit.
- Duplicate content in multiple places.
Although it is common to have some overlaps in website content, entire pages and sections should never be duplicated exactly. Putting up multiple copies of the same text will hurt your rankings. Just because it worked well once doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to clone it.
- Make huge changes without considering the impact on SEO.
Redesigns, testing new marketing theories, and major site overhauls will certainly affect rankings. If the intention is to have a positive impact, only make these large changes with the assistance of a knowledgeable SEO expert. If your website ranks well for certain key terms, be sure to continue to support those terms in your content. Expect to see a dip just after the change is made, but make the changes deliberately and carefully or you risk making that drop permanent.