By Candice Georgiadis, social media influencer and founder of Digital Day Inc, a social media and marketing agency in California.
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If you’re not familiar with SEO, it’s worth knowing that it can go wrong. In fact, there are multiple scenarios when SEO goes wrong. So how do you know if your site is doing well or not? The easiest way is to look at search results and see if there are any problems in the SERPs (search engine results pages). If there are issues like low-quality content or keyword stuffing on your site, then there could be an issue with its organic traffic—and that means you need to fix those issues before they get worse.
Low-Quality Content
Low-quality content is not useful to users, search engines, site visitors or the site owner.
The first thing you should do when you spot low-quality content on your site is to remove it. This helps prevent poor user experience and lowers your bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave after visiting a single page), which in turn increases your revenue from ads and other sales channels.
Low-Quality Links
Low-quality links are the most common cause of poor rankings. If your site has a lot of low-quality links pointing to it, this will hurt your ranking in search engines.
Low-quality links can come from:
• Spammy sites: These sites that are not authoritative and have no reputation for quality content.
• Sites with little or no content: If you don’t have a lot to say then people won’t find your site.
• Relevant but irrelevant websites: For example, if you’re an accounting firm, don’t try to get links from unrelated medical journals.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a big no-no for Google. When you have duplicate content on your website, it can be penalized by Google as well as hurt the user experience. You don’t want to confuse your audience and make them think that there are two versions of the same thing when they click on one link or page after another. It also doesn’t show that you care about providing useful information because different people will get different things out of the same piece of content depending on their needs and interests; this kind of duplication isn’t good for SEO either!
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a form of black hat SEO that can be penalized by search engines. It’s also known as “content spamming.”
You’ll see this kind of thing on many websites, such as when the title or the first paragraph of a webpage is full of keywords used to manipulate search engine rankings.
If you’re using keyword stuffing as part of your content strategy, don’t do it! It may seem like an effective strategy at first glance because it’s easy to get noticed by Google when you use lots of keywords in your content; however, doing so comes with risks—and those risks include being penalized by Google and having links removed from your site altogether if they catch onto what’s going on across their network.
Aggressive Optimization Of Anchor Texts
It’s important to use your keywords naturally and strategically. You don’t want to overdo it, but you also don’t want to use the same keyword too many times in a row. If a keyword is used three times on one page, this can be considered an over-optimization of that word.
In general:
• Use five to 10 different words per paragraph (not including headers).
• Don’t repeat any one word more than three times in a paragraph.
Conclusion
When it comes to SEO, there are many things that might go wrong. The most common ones are low-quality content and duplicate content, but there are also others that can cause your site to lose out on traffic or rankings. The best thing to do is avoid these mistakes by following the guidelines outlined here in order to ensure that your site stays on top.
