Search engine optimization has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Strategies that were amazingly popular and effective in the early 2000s are simply disastrous for your website now. Also, search engines have evolved tremendously. Their algorithms are getting better and better at discovering bad websites filled with duplicate and irrelevant content, which doesn’t bring any value to readers.

Surprisingly, these already obsolete SEO techniques and strategies are still popular among some web designers and digital marketers. Let’s take a look at some of the worst SEO techniques that will utterly TANK your website… Try to avoid them at any cost:

Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing was pure magic until the early 2000s – that’s a fact. Nowadays, however, it’s a disaster waiting to happen – and it will happen. This technique is literally a massive red flag in the eyes of Google, and your website will be instantly banned and deindexed from the search engine. It does sound crazy, but some people still do it. Think about it: a website selling fishing supplies would be something like: “the best fishing supplies here; we only have fishing supplies, right for you; come get your fishing supplies here, we are all about fishing supplies” – all in a sentence…

Duplicate content
If you have copied content on your website, it’s bad. Google hates duplicate content and will love to let you know that. Duplicate content, however, is tricky. For instance, if you are the original creator of the content, and other websites copy the content (with a citation), you are good to go. However, if Google sees that your content is not the original copy, your website will be penalized. Keep doing it and your website will be deindexed.

URL hijacking and typosquatting
Making typos is only human, right? Well, Google is now capable of detecting when typos are not entirely human errors. When webmasters hijack URLs, they essentially build a website around a typo. For instance, creating malicious domains built on similar reputed brands will get you penalized by Google instantly. Also, changing the country code won’t get you far. What’s more, you could easily be sued by the original brand or company.

Shady redirects from expired domains
Using the 301 redirect was working well back in the early 2000s and, amazingly, there are some webmasters who are still doing it. Exploiting expired domains is now penalized by Google and other serious search engines. Also, getting redirected to an old website, via an older one, and finally getting to the malicious website is bad business for your company as well.

Content automation
Getting a lot of content on your website is daunting, that’s a no-brainer. However, using a quick fix, like content automation, will get you into a lot of trouble with Google. This technique is used to create “ready to publish” content, filled with spun articles, images, headings, alignments, and so on – all poorly done. What you do get is simple: a website with a lot of content which simply cannot be read by a human being. Your website will experience rank loss and will get blacklisted in no time. What you have to do, however, is to get good quality content, written for human beings, not for search engines. Keep in mind: You are not fooling anyone, especially Google.

We all can relate to a website that simply stalls before loading content, or in another typical scenario, experience content that loads painfully slow. Most of us agree that either experience is annoying. But beyond annoying web visitors, let’s find out what the real consequences are for a sluggish website.

Show Me the Money

Once you assign a dollar value to speed, it becomes crystal clear in terms of real costs why the enduring visitor perception and experience with page speed relates directly to customer service and brand value.

For example, KISSmetrics presented statistics from Akamai who studied the dollar cost of speed as it relates to page conversions. They found a 1-second delay in page response time results on average in a 7% increase in page abandonment. The kicker here is that page abandonment exponentially grows as seconds add up, so a 4-second delay results in about 28% page desertion, which means your sluggish website is hemorrhaging visitors and potential income at an alarming rate!

Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal if you measure things like downloads and other call-to-actions where speed is not considered a critical metric, but it is an important metric when applied to an e-commerce site making $100,000 per day.

Think about it; a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales per year. Additionally, page speed is an important online metric for both perceived customer service and brand quality.

Check Your Website’s Speed

What does speed mean to website managers in 2018 and beyond? Don’t ignore it! Do everything in your power to increase the page speed of your website for both desktop and mobile sites. If your website is responsive, make sure it works well on every device imaginable. If you test your website and it’s found to be less than optimum, contact a competent web developer who knows how to optimize your website’s speed. It’s more affordable than most other SEO endeavors, and you have nothing to lose but customers-right?

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see your score and take notice of any advice they may give you in the results. Secondly, take a look at the size of your page, as many sites are bloated nowadays. Try to shave off as much as you can by optimizing images, compressing code and loading fewer external scripts and ads.

Maybe it’s time to drop the most egregious designer “cuties” that bloat your website and go with a more minimalist approach. What customers love most about your site is the content and how quickly they can see it!

Google Loves Speed, Too

Speed is most critical when web visitors are using mobile devices, but desktop websites are not off the hook. Google takes note of your website’s optimization for all devices, and poor results reduce search ranking automatically by its Page Rank algorithms. If your website speed is annoying enough to catch Google’s attention, then it’s a sure bet your user experience is in the toilet, too.

Of course, there are over 200 factors that make up Google page ranking; however, not all elements are weighted evenly or even come close to the importance of speed. Yes, your website should be responsive so it can work well on all types of devices. Yes, you should have a security certificate whether you are doing e-commerce or not. And yes, you need to optimize your website for speed. Once these things are in order, you can continue to add to the list, but these items are the most important after great content, which will always be number one.

XML Sitemaps for SEO

This is an important tool in SEO. They help the search engines decide on the pages to be crawled, based on the priority defined by the website. It also gives a clear idea on when the pages were updated last, based on which the bots can access the frequency of changes done on specific pages. Since all these data are vital to search engines to regularly crawl the pages, xml files too have their importance here.

Sitemaps improve the ranking of a website. The xml files are easily recognised by all search engines, thus you can submit the sitemaps for Google indexing, which makes it easier for the bots to track your pages. With the use of these files, the website and all its pages get better visibility of search engine spiders.

Website with No XML Sitemaps

There is no hard and fast rule that your website. However, the purpose of each website is fulfilled only when it reaches its targeted audience. For this, you need the help of search engines to take your website to the target group. When you create sitemaps, you make the job of bots easier by giving a list of all the pages of your website. By getting these sitemaps indexed, you can be assured that the website and all its pages are indexed on all search engines and thus available to the public.

For the above reasons, the creation of something not to be overlooked when you create a website. Make your website’s navigation simpler and thereby improve the traffic to your website. Make your website popular among your audience by taking care of these essentials of SEO.

XML Sitemaps for The Users

It’ll help the users to navigate through the website. It helps them locate the pages they’re looking for, making the website user-friendly. This is one of the major reasons why you need xml sitemaps for your website. It helps you retain your users.

Things To Remember While Creating XML Sitemaps

While creating xml sitemaps for your website, it is advised to have the sitemap on the homepage. This improves in indexing, which results in better crawling of search engine bots.

Though creating sitemaps is a time-consuming process, it is time well spent, and it enhances the website’s performance considerably by giving it better visibility and ranking, thereby earning more users at a consistent pace. Unless your pages are not indexed by crawlers, your website will not appear on search, thus xml sitemaps become very important for any website.