Stereotypes and algorithms of search engine behavior are a variable value. The good news is that this is why every self-respecting SEO-specialist is in constant self-development. The bad news: the rules of the game, which yesterday brought money, traffic and beautiful numbers in metrics, today suddenly stop working and collapsing indicators.
What mistakes can and should be avoided?
1. The promotion of landings
Numerous courses and training programs on the Internet promote branding as the most effective business tool in terms of promotion and conversion.
This is not true: promoting a single page, you can only work with a very limited group of requests – 10-15 key phrases. Everything else, in fact, remains overboard.
The actual trend is to create a branched structure, a large number of pages, more points of entry to the site. All this in complex allows you to get more traffic from search engines. Within the framework of branding to realize such a thing is not possible.
2. Narrow semantic core
This error stems from the previous one. It is made by specialists who believe that it is not worth spending a lot of time on collecting maximum semantics. They are limited to a small group of requests and work only with these keys. Now the trend is reversed – you need to collect as many key phrases as possible. We rarely work with semantics less than 1000 requests – requests. This is the minimum required for any project.
3. Page “404” and server code “200”.
Sometimes the error “404” may give a server response with code “200”, which signals to the search robot that the page is available for indexing. And it should be the other way around.
Often this is due to engine settings or incorrect server settings. And the main problem is that there can be a huge number of such pages. Even if you initially have on the site of real landing a few dozen.
Therefore, to avoid such garbage in the index and the negative impact of this on the rating of the site as a whole, be sure to check the response code of the server from time to time on pages “404”.
4. Low-quality content.
A frequent phenomenon: the contractor asks the customer for content to fill the site, and the representative of the company will borrow it from someone else’s site with minimal corrections. Search engines do not like such content, as their representatives are constantly reminded.
Another problem – the content is original, but of extremely low quality. As a rule, this applies to texts made by exchange copywriters. Such articles are uninformative, with a lot of “water”, sleeping together on keywords. They either do not answer user questions at all or are too superficial.
Write unique texts, involve authors who understand the topic, and use keywords and phrases in their natural form. Just a couple or three references to a text is enough for the search engine to understand what it’s about.
5. There are no meta tags.
Meta tags play an important role in search engine optimization. One of the major problems is the “zeroing” of meta tags as a result of work on the site. The reason for this may be:
- technical works;
- uploading of goods through import;
- moving to another hosting;
- the result of incorrect work of the plug-in, etc.
The solution is requested by itself. Before any more or less serious technical work to make a backup. And after their completion – check the key parameters.