Here are five signs your website needs a face lift in the New Year, based on Hubspot’s 17 SEO myths you should leave behind in 2016.

Yours isn’t mobile friendly

In 2015, Google had an algorithm update called “Mobilegeddon,” which expanded Google’s use of mobilefriendliness as a ranking signal. The update rewards mobile-friendly websites and penalizes those that aren’t fully optimized for mobile in mobile search results

The optimal experience for your visitors and your own performance is to implement responsive design. Responsive design makes your page adapt to the visitor and will display information that is sized and zoomed appropriately so it’s easy to read on whatever device he or she is using.

If your web presence screams 2009, you should be thinking about a comprehensive strategy to modernize your site and bring it in line with consumer expectations.

You have a bunch of bad links

In the past, building as many links as possible without analyzing the linking domain was how SEO typically worked.

Around Penguin 2.0, which was released in May of 2013, all of this changed. Nowadays, it is important to focus on the quality of links you are obtaining, rather than the quantity. Sometimes less can be more.

Too often, when businesses hire someone to do link building, they focus on the quantity of links rather than their quality — but linking is not a numbers game anymore (far from it, actually). You should focus on having relevant and diverse sources that link to relevant pages. When you invest in content, that content can be used for webpages, blog posts, lead generation offers, and guest posts on other sites — all content types that will bring more links with them over time.

You have keyword crammed in the past

Keyword stuffing is the act of shoving as many keywords onto the page as possible. Google’s own, Matt Cutts, warned us in 2007 against stuffing your page with keywords to rank higher in the search results.

Some webmasters did not take this to heart, until Google continuously came out with new algorithm updates, like Panda, every year that were meant to target bad content.

Keyword stuffing is 100% against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and is a dangerous game. Because of Google’s algorithm getting more advanced each year, you are likely to get your website penalised.

Note: Websites without any keywords get penalised too.

You have way too many pages

Just because you have pages indexed doesn’t mean they will drive qualified traffic and leads.

Unfortunately, those who strive to have lots of pages on their website also tend to overlook the quality of that content — and realistically, it’s difficult to strive for both. The aim should be to publish what is most relevant. Have your content be at its best.

Introduced in February, 2011, Google’s Panda algorithm updates have been getting better and better at detecting bad content. Nowadays, if you have poor content it is possible you may face a Google penalty, so make sure you are created great content that users want to read.

Your web pages don’t feature any images

For a long time, it was okay to neglect the images on your site and still rank without using alt text and image file names to boost your page relevance.

On-page SEO is more important than ever, so excluding images will prevent your website’s SEO from being the best it can be.

Search engines cannot see images on websites, so it is important to give the image an alt text and relevant file name to ensure Google knows what the image is about. By not creating this text, you lose a huge opportunity to be as visible as possible online.

 

We can help with custom web design and SEO copywriting services. Contact us for a free consultation today.