6 Simple Mistakes That May Lower Your Rankings

In my opinion, SEO is about balance.

Too much and the search engines may see your site as unnatural.

Too little and they may see your site as poorly optimized.

This is my opinion based on my own experience with rankings related to wp sites.

1. Adding Site Name to All Inner Pages & Posts.

This is an example of too much SEO.

When the engines scan all your titles in your sitemap, they will find you have exactly the same keywords in them which may be confusing.

Genesis SEO settings enable you to easily adjust your titles and Yoasts plugin also offers this feature.

2. Repeating Keywords in Titles

This could also be viewed as keyword stuffing as isn’t necessary.

Descriptive titles are important but no need to add exactly the same keywords more than once don’t you think?

You may also want to run your content through the keyword density checker.

3. Excessive Internal Linking

I don’t think there’s a magic number but if your content is focused on one keyword, why do you need to add lots of internal links to other url’s on your domain?

This can be seen as over optimization and trying too much to build rank for keywords.

4. Meta Description Mistakes

I’ve already written about what i think are best practices when adding meta descriptions.

The mistakes i see on a regular basis in the search snippets are spammy and non descriptive.

How many times have you seen poor meta descriptions in search results?

5. Not Much Unique Content

Basing a post on existing ideas and experiences in your niche produces rewritten content that’s simply not unique.

Producing new bleeding edge content is far more interesting and likely to be shared and linked to.

If you can’t think of idea’s to produce unique content, here’s some tools to find ideas on what to write about.

6. Low Quality Backlink Profile

It can be some work to monitor your incoming links manually if you don’t use the best tools.

It can hurt your rankings if you have a high ratio of links coming from low quality sites. Especially if those link domains have a problem which the search engines find out about.

Three tools you can use to find out the quality and rankings of domains linking to you which you can use to improve your rankings are:

Google Webmaster Tools feature for finding links to your site
Link Tool for finding the quality of the domain authority and page rank of the domains which link to your website.
Disavowing poor quality links

Video: 5 More Common Mistakes in SEO – By Google

Here’s a video created by Google which includes 5 more common mistakes in SEO

How About You?

Have you made any simple mistakes which resulted in lower rankings which you’d like to share?