How to Un-Search Engine Optimise your Website

There are hundreds of websites where you can go to learn about improving your search engine optimisation, but a topic that can be just as important are things your website may contain that are harming your rankings.  In no particular order, here are my 3 SEO pitfalls that you’ll want to avoid:

1) Covering your webpages with Google AdSense ads

This is also a big usability no no.  Google AdSense used correctly on a high traffic webpage can be a good source of revenue.  However, placing a lot of Google AdSense slots on an important page of your website not only cheapens the user experience, studies also show that its correlated to lower rankings.    

2) Excessive domain name length

Having a domain name with your main keyword in it can do wonders for your rankings for that term.  However, this can be taken too far.  You’ll want to avoid domain names that are too long and possibly spammy looking and contain too many hyphens.  For example www.designershirts.com.au is a lot better than www.buy-designershirtsdirectonline-forcheap.com  .  The longer domain also screams low quality website which will make it harder down the road to obtain links.  For entertainment sake I Googled “World’s longest domain name” and this is what came up

http://www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com/ (make No Follow)

3) Low Quality Pages Containing Low Quality Content

Although until 2011 this used to work very well, recent Google algorithm changes have made it a big rankings dropper.  In short you’ll want to stay away from creating hundreds of pages that have just a small amount of keyword rich content.  This won’t be helpful to your human users and will now anger the Google search bots to the point where your whole domain can get penalised in the Google rankings.  If you do have a few pages with light content, this shouldn’t be a concern.  If you have dozens of pages with light content then you should consider combining the content of these pages into smaller groups of richer content pages.  The easiest way to do it is to combine pages that follow a similar theme.   

As with all SEO if you ask yourself these two simple questions regarding any page on your website and the answer is “yes” then you should be fine:

1. Have I placed the keywords I want to rank on for this page in prominent areas?
2. Are the changes I’m making to the page increasing its usability and improving the overall user experience?

If you’re wondering if we have ever had anyone call us to “un-SEO” their website, the answer is yes. I actually had a website client call me a couple of years back and state that too many people are calling them and emailing them.  Basically they had limited stock of their rental equipment and it was almost always rented out so they were sick of new people calling and asking to hire it.  I think we would all agree that this is an excellent problem to have.