**SEO practices have changed drastically recently due to a number of changes in Google, which means it’s easy for people to make mistakes if they’re not completely up to scratch.**
Even the smallest SEO slip-ups will require extra work in order for your site to be search engine friendly down the line. Here are some points to consider if your website isn’t ranking as well as you would like:
**Poor keyword research**
Beginning with thorough keyword research is essential to the ranking of your site. Use tools like Google Keyword, Wordtracker Keyword Tool, or SEO Moz to help you. Keyword research is the foundation of a successful campaign, and it’s important to check out which keywords your competitors are ranking for too.
**Focusing solely on search engines**
It is important that you optimize your site for search engines, but at the same time your content must appeal to your human visitors. Keep focused on creating quality content that humans will want to read and engage with.
**Poor quality content**
(link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/writing-quality-content/ text: Writing lengthy, highly detailed and useful articles popup: true title: The 6 Step Plan to Writing Killer Content) is what will get your site ranking highly in search engines. Google tends to rank pages with at least 2000 words the most highly, preferring content-rich sites. This also increases your likelihood of receiving links, as people prefer to link to in-depth content.
**Rich anchor text links**
A keyword-rich anchor text link is text containing one of your target keywords linked to a URL, rather than more generic text like ‘click here’.
Anchor text links that are too rich are bad for your site, and it’s important to vary your anchor text. A lot of links to your site with rich anchor text appear unnatural. When you do build rich anchor texts, it’s important to keep it varied.
**Sites that can’t be fully indexed**
If the search engines spiders can’t index your site properly, you can’t attract your search traffic.
Image overuse means that search engine spiders can’t read text included in the images, and if you store important elements in you images it may not be indexed properly.
Flash animation and JavaScript are also difficult for search engines to read.
**Lack of updates**
Updating your site is also important for human visitors and search engine crawlers. Outdated information on your site reduces its perceived value and leads to fewer returning visitors. Adding new content regularly – for instance including a blog on your site – exposes it to more keywords, and is more likely to get it ranked for search engine queries with a timeliness factor.
**Link building**
You don’t need a huge amount of links to rank your website, but you do need to build them slowly and steadily. The quality of the links is most important. In the online marketing of 2013, it’s better to go for a small amount of authoritative links, rather than a lot of poorer quality ones. If you build links at an unnatural pace, you won’t rank well.
**Ways to increase your authority**
Becoming an authority site means ranking more highly. There are a number of ways you can do this, for example:
– (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/social-media-roi/ text: Social media popup: true title: Social Media and You: Getting Maximum ROI from Minimal Effort) is important for the ranking of your website – Google and Bing have both publicly said that they consider social signals when ranking your site, and by getting more tweets, likes and shares your website will rank more highly.
– Google can now verify authors, so they know who creates great or poor content. This means that even without a lot of links you could rank highly if you have good quality blog posts on your site.
– Older websites will hold a better page rank, even without a high number of back links. Therefore it might be a good idea to buy an older domain when starting up your business online.
– Make the most of the (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/best-seo-tools/ text: SEO tools popup: true title: Superdream’s Guide to 7 of the Best SEO Tools) that are on the market. These can help you with every aspect of optimisation – from keyword research, through to (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/digital/website-analytics/ text: reporting and analytics popup: true title: Website Analytics).
SEO methods are changing all the time, and it’s important to keep up if you want your site to continue to rank well. A slow and steady approach, with thoroughly researched keywords, featuring detailed, high quality content, is the best way to ensure your website isn’t penalised. Your site must be user-friendly and compelling, and simple technical mistakes avoided.