Monday, January 27, 2014

3 Things That Can Harm Your SEO


SEO has a lot of components to it and each one is essentially as important as the other parts because they all contribute important aspects to successful SEO efforts. If you do not do all of the different components currently, your SEO will suffer. However, there are three things that harm your SEO without you really even realizing it. Well, until you read this blog post.

  1. Not having fresh content. Not having fresh content when you write things like blogs and articles, as well as your website content, means that search engines will not like you. If you don't have original content, then that means you copied it from somewhere else and that is plagiarism and a big no-no to search engines. What will happen? You will be penalized by either have bad rankings and even getting your website blocked. Believe it or not, copying content you wrote but for something else counts too; did you have a great article that you think would make for a wonderful blog post as well? Well, you can reuse it but you'd better change the words and rewrite it or you'll be in some trouble. Trust someone in the search engine optimization business who does blogging, search engines know when you do this. 
  2. Having a slow loading site. People expect websites to load in less than a second. So what if your website takes 5 seconds to load, or worse, 10 seconds? In the grand scheme of things, waiting 10 seconds for something like the internet to load and getting upset is ludicrous, but it is what it is. So how does a slow website harm your SEO? Well, the point of SEO is to get your website more exposure and get more people to visit your website; if your site takes too long to load, people give up on it and leave. People giving up on your site does not accomplish the goal of SEO; in fact, it raises your bounce rate which can harm your ranking chances. 
  3. Poor navigation of the website. This can harm your SEO because if a search engine crawler has trouble moving around your site, it will not send a favorable report back to Google, Yahoo, whoever, and it will not look good for you. Also, if people have trouble, navigating your site, they won't return and that won't be good for you either. 
Take a look at these three things when analyzing your site and its promotion. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Integraphix - a Chicago marketing company and we'll be glad to help you out.