12 Most Important SEO Factors Which Can Screw Your Site

These days SEO is all about white hat techniques and strategies. Below I have mentioned 12 most important SEO factors for your blog/website success. Implement these tasks regularly to avoid Google slaps and updates. You might think my site is doing good, I don’t need this  information. Yes, Everything seems to be fine. The traffic, comments, SERPs, rankings and etc. Suddenly you will see a big drop in your site traffic and your heart will be in your mouth. All that amazing traffic and search engine positions are lost. You might be wondering “What the heck I’ve done!” Well, you have not done anything! That’s the whole point.

This traffic lost is mainly because of Google farming algorithms. You might have heard about Panda, Penguin, EMD and other farming updates. All these updates are done to maintain the decorum of Google search results. In one way, I guess Google is correct. The users should never experience problems from a website, where Google can completely take care of.

Whatever site you are having, just make sure to maintain high quality links, articles. If your site quality is poor, the Panda, Penguin updates are ready to slam you down. So what exactly you have to do?

Your site should always have that importance and optimization for consistent traffic. No matter what ever you do, make sure to follow few important factors in your site SEO. I’ve included all important factors alphabetically. Check out these 12 most important SEO factors you should take care of.

12 Most Important SEO Factors:

Above fold ads:

If your site is displaying too many ads above the fold, you are asking for trouble. Above the fold ads indicates the upper part of the page, where you display more ads than required. Which means, if you are including too many ads in the upper part of your site, you are screwed.

Just for example, a lot of people use two big ad blocks at the start of their post/article. This is not at all good for your site. Your site may get farmed by Google instantly. Make sure to avoid this bad practice of gaining quick revenue from your visitors.

If you wanted to display ads above the fold, make sure to put more content and very less ad blocks. You can replace your ad blocks with smaller ad units. Instead of 336 x 250 large rectangle ad block, use 250 x 250 small square ad block. I would suggest you to use only one ad above the fold. This is one of the most important SEO factor you should take care of.

Bad Traffic Sources:

It’s good to track your traffic source. Check out where your traffic is coming from. You have to analyze the traffic source and find out how you can improve them. If you traffic is from a bad source, your site linking to it will be considered as a spam.

Your site shouldn’t use spam traffic practices to get targeted traffic. You can observe this in many forums and micro niche blogs. Though the content is good, you should never get spam traffic from bad sources.

Comment Spam:

If your site is allowing too many spammy commentators, then you are in trouble. The problem is from both the side, people who comment will get slapped by Google, and people who accept it. These spammy comments are very annoying and boring. They all have the same content with different product details. This comment spam is usually done with help of a spinner content bots.

Make sure to avoid these spammy comments. Even if you are using Akismet or GASP, still people will try to spam your site. Take necessary precautions to put a check to these spammers. If you site is doing good with enough traffic, then use a Facebook/Twitter login access to comment on your blog. This will avoid bots, spammers and other unwanted comments.

Site Crawler Issues:

Make sure to check your site for regular crawl errors. You might have seen a lot of 404, 500 crawl errors in most of your sites. This is because of improper link structure. If you have recently migrated from blogger to WordPress, you might have changed the link structure and redirection.

Avoid these errors by installing necessary plugins. You can always login to your Google Webmaster tools and check if there are any crawl errors. If Google find too many 500 issues, its giving a hint to algorithm to slap your site.

Duplicate  Titles/Meta Content:

Avoiding duplicate content is most important factor for your site. When I’m saying duplicate content, its not about the content alone, I’m talking even about the title and its meta content. You have to take care this duplicate titles and meta content with this issue. quickly.

Make sure to write original titles and meta descriptions. If you are having multiple pages with same title and meta tag, quickly change them. This might be considered as a duplicate issue by Google, and the rest you know already.

Duplicate Tags:

Tagging your content is a popular method of displaying your content in search engines. Using title tags, the author will imagine a list of tags which usually people use to find your content. Let these tags be limited.

Don’t put to many tags and confuse search engines. This technique is used to category the content properly. If you spam tags with lot of tags, you will end up with unlimited number of pages with ungrouped content. This is a serious issue by Google webspam algorithms. So its better to limit your tags to 0.5% or below to actual words in your content.

This means, if your article is 1000 words, don’t put more than 5 different tags. Though this doesn’t show much impact in sending good traffic, it will still atleast stop you to get banned by Google.

Malware Issues:

If Google find a malware in your site, It will first send you a warning message in Google Webmasters. Check your messages and notifications on a regular basis to take action. Usually Google finds few malware issues in websites. Once it finds out the issue, it will send a warning message to the site owner. Respond to it quickly and give Google a proper reply.

You have to remove the malware effected pages or files form your site as soon as possible. Once Google red marks your site as a malware, your site is totally screwed. Though you can still reclaim your site after recovery, its not guaranteed that your site will be recovered.

Avoid these malware attacks by continuous optimizations and error check methods. If you have issues with a particular page, you can use the Fetch as Google bot feature in your Webmaster Tools. If your site is effected frequently, then check for hacking attacks and unauthorized usage.

Over Interlinking:

Backlinking is a your own pages is a good way of increasing page views and traffic. This doesn’t mean you have to over inter link you articles.  Some blogs never allow you to read the actual content in the page. They link too many pages in a single paragraph.

If you are splitting your pages into too many links, you are bothering the spiders to crawl a particular page. You no need to link to 50 articles in a 500 word article. People will get easily distracted from reading the actual post. Not good for you and for SEO practices.

Page Speed:

How would you feel if you are in slow loading site? You would obviously go out of the site without loading it completely. Right? The same way even others will go out of your page/site if it loads slow. Your site speed score shouldn’t be less than 85% out of 100.

Though Google farming updates are not completely depended on page speed factors, its still your duty to take care of them. Google will send you a warning in Google Analytics account, as soon as it finds the high loading pages.

Paid Links:

Never ever sell links from your site. Usually almost all the sites which pay for a back link are spammy. These sites get 100’s of links from different sources to get good domain authority and page rank.

If you are selling links to these kind of spammy sites, your site will be soon penalized. You can put a nofollow banner ad for sending traffic to their sites. But never ever give a dofollow link for little amounts. This might effect your whole site most of the times.

Reciprocal Linking:

This old practice is used by many bloggers and webmasters to get back links. Usually these sites will link back to each other by putting some links in their blogrolls. Reciprocal linking will effect your site rankings and lead to penalize your site.

Avoid using blogrolls to link back to your friends or bloggers. If you wanted to use a blogroll, make sure you are not reciprocating the links. This will help your site from getting banned by Google.

Webmaster Tools Trackback:

You should always keep track of your site analytics. Check out what went wrong if your site traffic is suddenly down. Google Webmaster Tools play a crucial role in setting up a spam free successful website.

Google webmaster account will display all your sites according to their health. If any one of your blog health is going down, make sure to find the problem in it. All your sites should have a consistent flow of good SEO practices.

These are the 12 most important SEO factors you need to take care of. If you have any issue or problem with your site, please drop me a line below. I’ll make sure to reply you asap. Happy SEO 🙂