SEO has never been exact. Faults that may affect it need not be strictly linked to the requirements of Google’s algorithms for our websites. Google has become more acute over time, it’s getting harder and harder to “cheat it” with more attention paid to details and little side things that make the visitors to leave or stay on the site. Nowadays you personally have to be willing to listen to the market preferences and figure out users’ expectations with equal dedication to both matters. We give you a few pointers that may affect your SEO success.

1. Website Is Not Optimized For Mobile Devices

If the website is not optimized for mobile screens and tablet devices, Google is more than obvious to declare “war” on those. For this reason precisely, but many others too that include the increase in popularity and statistics that indicates that people are much more likely to use mobile devices to browse the Internet, the year of 2015 is crucial for this type of website optimization, in case you have not done it yet.

In one of our previous articles we tried to make this process as easy as possible, and we have prepared a manual that will help you with it: Ways To Optimize WordPress Website For Displaying On Mobile And Tablet Devices.

2. Slow Loading Of The Website

It would be wrong to sacrifice the website speed in order to add various options (through addons or optimization). If your website’s server is experiencing a problem or you are using poorly optimized scripts (design, plugins) that drain resources and slow down the loading, your site’s ranking may be heavily questioned. There are two things to consider:

• Google algorithms that calculate positioning of the website, always favor faster sites
• Visitors prefer content they seek is available in the shortest time span possible

The problem with resource overuse can cause slow loading or even suspension of the website, which may be solved by moving to a larger hosting package. For achieving the best results in tasks that require speed, power and control in terms of services, check out the Cloud Hosting – VPS SSD servers and Dedicated servers.

3. Setting Up The Website On A Subdomain

The subdomain partners.mycompany.net is a great way to make public Internet presence to your associates and clients. However, when it comes to SEO – subdomain is treated as a separate domain that has a separate sitemap with separate traffic and ranking, without having the main domain benefit from it in any way. Setting up the site into the domain’s subfolder challenges a different approach to the problem:

mojafirma.net/partneri

Subdirectory is a far better option if you are looking to have traffic and rankings added to the main domain (mycompany.net) and thereby improve the SEO impression you leave on search engines.

4. Plenty Of Plugins For WordPress

Lower the number of WordPress plugins and use only the necessary ones. Most plugins and themes for WordPress generate additional connections (links) because authors use them as links to theirpresentation and previous work. Such links are often found at the base (footer); meaning, they’ll be appearing on every page and will potentially affect the SEO status. They are called sitewide.

Google algorithm can easily detect all unnatural links, including sitewide ones. To some extent, you may simply ignore the issue; however, if your page starts spreading hundreds of links to various, unrelated sites not even remotely related to your content – you can end up in trouble.

5. Postponing SEO For Later

Building a website should include a parallel development plan for Search Engine Optimization as well. Still, what usually happens is that marketing is often given advantage over optimization. Best case scenario in neglecting SEO means leaving things to chance. Search engines will index the website the way they find it necessary, with the quality and point you wanted (and should have) highlighted left skipped and overlooked. This will be an immediate loss for your benefit.

The SEO is harder, bigger and more expensive if done in retroactive manner. Plan while working.

6. Keywords Are Not Enough

The purpose of keywords is to signal the browser what content of all websites indexed refers to, while the total SEO requires much more. Keywords must be the product of the content and they should exist only as such. Highlighted words not linked to the text may harm your SEO.

Well planned and processed through the content, keywords combined with social network tags (#hashtags) can be good triggers that will attract more positive ranking.

7. Poor Contents, Short Texts

Search engines like rich content. The final, lowest limit of words in the text is no less than three hundred words, while the high quality texts are those with more than a thousand words (at least when it comes to SEO).

However, no matter how great the concept of a thousand-word-content may sound, authors aren’t always inspired to write a thousand-word text covering a particular topic, idea, information or even haiku. In this case, include a no_index option in order for it not to get indexed by search engines.

8. Obsolete And Outdated Content

Here’s an example:

• Outdated content – If you’ve written an article recommending good hosting, you have probably included the package descriptions, prices and links to them. In the meantime, the hosting provider happened to have changed the offer and prices. If you haven’t caught up with these changes and haven’t consequently updated them, your content becomes useless and obsolete.
• Expired content – You have written an article about Mozilla browser installation, “How to install Mozilla browser?”. Today, Mozilla browser no longer exists, meaning – your text has expired.

Contents such as text, images and videos will not bring great harm, but links leading to non-existent pages can.

9. XML Sitemap Is Not Included

XML Sitemap is a file that contains a list of all site’s links available for indexing by search engines. Sitemap is making searching easier, providing insight into each new change that your site experiences (new content, additional links and pages…).

XML Sitemap option is easily switched on with the help of plugin  if you are using WordPress. If you are using WordPress SEO by Yoast, you can access this feature through the plugin settings (read Adjusting the settings of SEO → Step 4).

10. Ten Bad Links Are Still Worse Than One Good Link

Even though Google’s doing just fine with links, you shouldn’t torture it by giving it too much work on deciding which one is good enough for your site and whether to count it in your website position within search results. If you have an option to choose through links you want to share, choose the best ones, well ranked and those with most similar content. Be sure to read through them and make sure the content you are redirecting your customers to is complete and useful.

11. Prioritizing Optimization Over Pleasing Visitors

What can happen is for you to do everything impeccably in terms of optimizing your website but still harm your page. How so? Well, if your site loses a personal touch and fails to create a relationship with the customer – you’ve made a big mistake. A good SEO strategist will deal with the website optimization without compromising your relationship with the readers and clients. Furthermore, this person should also recommend you an additional strategy and suggest a way to keep the relationships solid, the customers satisfied and the conversion flowing. If your page fails to feature useful, interesting, well told contents – SEO alone, even if done flawlessly, won’t matter. Keep in mind that the purpose of optimization is to accentuate the already existing quality and make it more accessible.

Test Your Website

To test your website and find potential mistakes – try SEOCrawler. Registration is free (for the basic package) and the service testing is simple. All it takes is to enter the link to your website and you’ll soon get results with a description of the problem found. With SEOCrawler you can do the following:

• test any site (yours or your client’s) looking for SEO mistakes
• find broken links
• see how your competitors are doing and use their strategy on your website

Google Insights

Be sure that Google can no longer be cheated regarding the assessment of what’s indexed on the broadband Internet. Algorithms now demand more honesty, more connectivity, a strong focus on the content-title relation and the interaction with readers. Many social networks and communications will bring good results, so if you are a fan of Facebook and Twitter, you’ll have your hands full. Further, don’t forget about Google+, Pinterest and Instagram if your presentation supports photo material.