In SEO, there are many good practices to follow on a website. These practices help to improve the user experience and the ranking of your pages. However, good practices also mean bad practices. Indeed, there are actions that should not be carried out on your website for fear of being penalised by the search engines.

In this article, we will show you what you should not do on your website for SEO.

1. Neglecting the basics of SEO

In this section, we will discuss a non-exhaustive list of important SEO criteria to consider.

Bad Title & Bad Meta Description

The Title and Meta Description are the heart of a web page for SEO purposes. In addition to the content of the page, they dictate which queries to rank for. However, it is too often noted that these two elements are only optimised on very few websites.

As a reminder, the Title is the title that will appear on the search results pages (SERP). It should be about 60 characters long and contain the main keywords of your page. Many pages have a Title that is either too short (less than 40 characters) or far too long (more than 70 characters). Some do not even contain keywords or do not exist.

This is the same mistake for the Meta description which is the short text below the Tilte on a SERP. It must also include keywords and must be approximately 160 characters long. It can be considered unoptimised if it has no keywords, is too short (less than 130 characters), too long (more than 180 characters) or simply does not exist.

Bad structure of the headings

Another common SEO problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible is headings. As a reminder, headings are the titles of your page. Obviously, your page should only contain a main title (H1). For the rest (H2, H3, H4, etc.), they must follow a logical order. You should break down your page like a presentation:

Title (H1)

Subtitle 1 (H2)
- Section 1 (H3)
- Section 2 (H3)

Subtitle 2 (H2)

Subtitle 3 (H2)

It is necessary that your pages are consistent.

Slow loading time

We've also talked about this before, but a slow page is a page that drives people away. A high bounce rate does not have a good impact on your SEO. A slow page penalizes the user experience. There are many causes: media files (images) that are too large (not compressed and not resized), code that is too large (not minified), too many animations, etc.

It is therefore necessary toimprove the loading speed of your web pages.

2. Create poor quality content

It is often said that content is ROI. This is true, but only in certain cases. Indeed, content is ROI only if it is of high quality. Poor" content does not convert, does not attract.

The problem with this sentence is that for SEO, one is ready to write a lot of content to the point of neglecting the added value that it brings. There is also a temptation not to worry about the needs of Internet users, but only about optimising your content. However, one must not go without the other.

Your content must meet a need AND be optimised for SEO. So focus on the users and then the optimisation.

To optimise your content, without impacting on quality, you can use the semantic field of your query and identify questions and points to address to differentiate yourself.

3. Competing with oneself: Self-cannibalisation

Another bad SEO practice that happens too often is to compete with your own content. It can happen when writing content, especially on a blog, to deal with a specific theme. This or these themes imply writing content to fetch queries.

However, it is possible that two or more of your articles are positioned on the same query. However, most of the time, Google will favour the content it finds best and the other will disappear. Content that is too similar between your pages can therefore self-cancel.

To avoid this, you can combine your similar content or you can use a canonical tag . This tag tells Google that this page is the best answer to the user's search query on your website.

PS: Duplicate content is also a practice to be banned permanently.

4. Not having a URL structure

The URLs of a website are a landmark for search engines, but also for Internet users. Your URLs must be clear, short and must include the main keywords of your page. Not having an SEO-friendly structure is penalizing.

In addition, each page must have a clearly identifiable URL structure. You can create folders to have a clear structure. For example: https://www.digidop.fr/ → https://www.digidop.fr/blog → https://www.digidop.fr/blog/creer-architecture-site-e-commerce-miro

URLs allow search engines to understand the tree structure, the general architecture of your website.

5. Do not redirect a page after a URL change

Over time, it may happen that a URL on a page needs to be changed. This is a normal process. What you should not do is change the URL without redirecting.

Search engines use URLs to access pages on your website. When someone clicks on your website in the Google results, it is the URL that directs them to your page. If you change a URL without notifying Google, the old URL may remain in the results for some time.

This means that anyone who clicks on that page in the results will be redirected to a URL that no longer exists, so website visitors are greeted with the notorious 404 page. This is not good for your SEO.

To fix this common problem, you need to do a 301 redirect. Usually Webflow proposes to do it automatically, on Wordpress you will probably have to install a plugin.

6. Neglecting web accessibility

This is an important point for us at Digidop. Too many websites are not accessible for everyone. Problems of visibility, readability, ... this is not very good for your pages. There are simple techniques to make your site more accessible like putting "alt text" tags to your images for example.

To learn more about digital accessibility, you can read our article on making your website inclusive.

7. Focus only on backlinks

Too often we hear that backlinks are the mainstay of SEO. This was true at one time (when there was only thePageRank search algorithm), but today it is only one of many SEO criteria. To rank well on Google, you need not only backlinks, but also quality content.

Agencies or websites that only focus on acquiring backlinks waste a lot of money and time.

There you go, you now know the common mistakes not to make for SEO. To detect all these mistakes, you can perform a full SEO audit of your website.