What To Avoid When Developing a Search-Optimized Website?

Last Updated
April 24, 2024
What To Avoid When Developing a Search-Optimized Website?

In the fast-paced digital realm, a search optimized website stands as a cornerstone of online success. With strategic optimization, businesses can significantly enhance their visibility, ensuring they are easily found by their target audience.

By ranking higher in search engine results, these websites attract organic traffic, leading to increased brand exposure and potential customer engagement. Being on the first page in SERP result should be the priority for the companies. Market study reveals that less than 1% of searchers on the internet, click on the second page of Google results. 

So, before you get down to finding out the things to avoid while developing a search-optimized website, you should know what SEO is. 

What Is SEO?

SEO basically means ‘search engine optimization’. In layman’s terms, SEO means the improvement of your website and increasing its visibility on search engines, such as Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines. The places where most internet users search for products to buy or sell, services, and information on research topics, are governed by SEO. The better the visibility of your website or page, the higher the chances of your business getting found and clicked on. 

The main goal of SEO is to help attract website visitors who will become customers in the times to come. It is the website again that makes your customers come back for more. 

Importance of SEO in Website Development

As you already know by now, how SEO is important, you should also know why. Here are the reasons mentioned below. 

SEO Increases Organic Search Web Traffic 

All the Google results that one gets, without paid ads.-, are termed organic searches. It contributes a bigger chunk of performance parameters for a website. It also helps to send customers to a specific site. So, if you want your website to work, you have to ensure to send lots of traffic there. 

It Gives A Better User Experience 

You can give your users a great website experience, by incorporating a clean design. Photos and videos also play a huge role here. These are a part of SEO strategies. 

Good SEO Leads To Good Amount Of Local Sales 

Local businesses mainly depend on SEO, as it impacts the local traffic. Most customers today, prefer to search for businesses online, and the same applies to local ones, more than any other. 

SEO Has The Power To Increase Credibility Of Your Business

When your website ranks high on the search engine, it automatically gives a huge boost to your website performance. It also shows that your site is worth trusting. 

SEO Helps Businesses Get The Right ROI 

Firstly, when a business runs ads on an online platform, the users click on the ad. This leads the users to the particular website. So, you need to have an optimized website design, to make that happen. Thus, you can conclude that SEO makes ads more effective. 

So, these are a few reasons why SEO is important for your business. 

In this blog, we will attempt to highlight the common mistakes that one must avoid, to get success with SEO. 

Things To Avoid While Building A Search-optimized Website 

1. Avoiding Keyword Research 

You must understand the inherent connection between SEO and keyword research. This will help you to gain maximum. 

You will be bewildered to know that Keyword research is important for any SEO and SEM campaign. Without it, digital marketers and web developers will not be able to generate relevant content. 

Here are 5 key reasons why it is important. 

  • It helps you to find out what the users globally are searching for, you must conduct thorough keyword research. People generally search for short-tail keywords or single words, and in some cases, long-tail keywords, also called phrases. This is vital for the web strategy.   You will have to use the same in your content. 
  • Keyword research also reveals how much competition there is in a certain category. So, you will be able to plan on those lines. It helps to create content based on your target audience. 
  • It helps in identifying keywords that have low competition. So, you can create content by including keywords with low competition from your rivals. More traffic, that is organic, as well, will travel to your website.
  • It also helps to understand the search intent. Google works by delivering results, according to the demands and needs of the users. By research, you can understand the intent of each keyword, and plan accordingly. 
  • Keyword research also assists in generating new content. You can plug into your competitor’s domain and find out what content is on top of the headlines. Once you make a list of keywords, you can remove the ones that are low on performance. 

2. Ignoring On-Page Optimization 

To boost your website’s SEO, on-page optimization is absolutely essential. It is actually a very essential part of your SEO strategy. It includes optimization of the page contents, which can lead to a better user experience. 

On-page SEO is about improving the different elements of the web pages. This helps not just the users, but also the search engine. It is completely under your control. Search engines display websites on the first page if the web pages are nicely designed and user-friendly. Some of the on-page elements worth looking into are:

  • Header Tags
  • Titles
  • Content Description
  • Content 
  • Internal and external links
  • FAQs
  • Images with alt text and proper captions
  • Names of clickable elements
  • Meta robots
  • Canonical links
  • Page load speed
  • Schema

If these are not perfect, you can miss the first page of the search engine. It can lead to detrimental situations. 

Let us learn about the impact, if you tend to ignore on-page search engine optimization. 

3. Duplicate Content In Different Pages

Google or just any other search engine considers the web pages of your website as separate entities. So, if the content is the same on all web pages, then you could be thrown off the ranks. The only way to address this is to create unique content for each page. 

Thin Content On The Website

Thin content is not necessarily short in length. It is something bigger, and more relevant. If your content lacks depth, then it is considered thin content. If you are in the technical businesses, then it could throw you off the tracks. Low-quality content is something that Google hates. Things that you write on the website must be of some use to the people. Just beating around the bush, does not help in websites. 

4. Poor Quality Links 

Here we are talking about external as well as internal links. Some external links can be plain spam. Again, if we talk about interlinking the internal pages, you should never overdo it. Google says that businesses should make pages for the users, and not the search engines. Your web pages should follow a logical structure that is easy to understand. So, there are many things that can happen, if you miss out on or neglect on-page optimization. 

5. Overlooking Mobile-Responsiveness

Today, a maximum number of people open Google Chrome or any other browser on their smartphones. So, if your website does not look good on the mobile screen, you are out of business. Traffic will not reach your website. Mobile responsiveness mainly revolves around your website pages to fit all screen sizes. Users who do not have laptops and computers do much of their work on their smartphones and tablets. So, you have to be sure of the responsiveness on multiple devices. 

To avoid hassles, you must do the following:

Give mobile responsiveness a lot of importance

Use responsive techniques, such as flexible grids and media queries

Test the website on various devices before launch 

6. Ignoring High-quality Content 

This is one of the most impactful spaces that can make it or break it. You cannot just put any content, in your blog, social media pages, or newsletter. Quality matters, and you should check if your content has fluff. Your blog posts must be indexed as well. Producing content, just for the sake of content working can bring down your business. So, learn what the features of low-quality content are:

  • Duplicate or Plagiarized content
  • Grammatical errors
  • Scattered content
  • Slow loading time
  • Old and outdated content
  • Wrong facts
  • AI content

If you want to rank #1, on Google or any search engine, producing good content is the only way out. Even if a few pages are bad, your site will not rank. 

That is why you must create good, meaningful content, and get them written by professionals. If you do outsource, do it to reputed agencies. 

7. Neglecting Technical SEO

If you are selling products, then you need to understand the technicalities of technical SEO. It can drive traffic to your site and also boosts online visibility. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your ecommerce website, so that search engines can easily crawl and index your site on search engines. It includes site speed, mobile friendliness, and secure connectivity. Incorporating it increases your site’s chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages. 

You could do the following:

  • Improve the site structure
  • Enhance speed
  • Use Search Console
  • Use descriptive and keyword-rich URLs
  • Use alt text for all the images
  • Use XML sitemaps
  • Use clean HTML code
  • Use Content Delivery Network

8. Failure To Optimize For Local Search 

Local SEO mistakes can have huge repercussions on your website’s productivity. If you are providing local services, like plumbing, salon services, dog training etc., then this is very important for your business. Some of the mistakes that businesses often make are:

  • Using keyword targets that are not local
  • Targeting keywords that are broad
  • No customer reviews

But, do not fret yet, as we are here to help you. You can encourage your local customers to give positive reviews. Here are a few tips that work.

  • Give customers special packages and oblige them to write good things about you. 
  • Offer extra freebies for positive reviews. 
  • Ask your customers about your social media pages.
  • Get a Google My Business Profile. 
  • Delete duplicate listings. 
  • Add contact information on your website
  • Optimize your content for Local SEO. 

If you can do these, it’s half the battle won. 

9. Ignoring Link Building 

You should give time to properly interlink all the important pages and if possible make a cluster of the link flow. Improving link building will improve your brand authority, as well as guide users to the correct page for them.

Moreover, it also leads to faster indexing. Google or any search engine will index pages based on their utility. It also boosts website ranking. If you include link building, you build relationships. Thus, if you have not yet paid attention to this aspect, it is time to do so. Here are a few best practices that can impact your website performance. 

  • Focus on quality content
  • Create relevant content
  • Diversify the anchor text
  • Pay adequate attention to internal links

Conclusion 

These are a few things that you must include in your SEO strategy. Then only, you will be able to move ahead and rank high on Google or just about any search engine. Do not settle for the mediocre, when developing search-optimized websites.