The first is simply due to lack of attention or ignorance, but the second case, personally, it makes me a little angry, I do not know if these errors are made by people who do not know about SEO and misapply it (which I see normal) or by people who “know” about SEO and make terrifying recommendations.
1. Use underscores instead of hyphens in URLs
Table of Contents
When making a new website, many developers use underscores by default to separate words, this may also be due to the fact that many programming languages reserve hyphens for other purposes.
EVIL!
ALL RIGHT!
In the event that we have a huge website, the fact that we change all the URLs can be a pain, although if we have the time and the desire it does not hurt to do it, but if it is not the case, taking into account this advice in a future, we will have already taken a step.
2. Use hyphens in domains
This is a very common mistake that is directly related to wanting to add keywords to our domain, thinking that this way we will obtain an unimaginable positioning capacity. Well, relatively recently Google released an update to its algorithm in which domains with keywords stopped having extra benefits .
Personally, the domains that have scripts for the simple fact of adding keywords generate mistrust, because if your content or whatever you offer is of quality, it is not necessary that you try to position simply by the domain. Also, the most successful cases are not exactly keyword domains, see Amazon or Asos.
3. Create content by creating content
It is true that Google gives more importance than ever to content , that having good original content is very beneficial for SEO, which is why lately Content Marketing is more important than ever.
The content of a page has to be useful and helpful . What is achieved by having low quality content in which we only seek to have more text volume to enter more keywords is that our bounce rate increases (which Google does not like at all), our users do not get what they are looking for and do not want to return, in addition to a possible penalty.
Disregarding this point will lead us directly to the next error.
4. Create pages for having content
I recently had the opportunity to see how the website of a client that was positioning very well for a keyword fell on the cliff of positioning, why ?, create a lot of pages attacking that keyword to get them all positioned, which He failed to.
My recommendation is: if you want to position a keyword, center a page on that keyword and try to create the most useful, original and fantastic content you can . Let’s give an example, we want to position «black t-shirts» but we have created all these pages:
- Black t-shirts
- Black t-shirts for men
- Black t-shirts for women
- Black t-shirts for boys
- Black t-shirts for girls
- Black baby shirts
- Black T-shirts for adults
- Black children’s t-shirts
In this case, what we are generating is cannibalization of keywords , Google will not know which page of black shirts is the most important and surely decides that none of your pages about black shirts is important.
How do we avoid cannibalizing keywords?
Through the content hierarchy. Following the previous example of black shirts, the correct thing would be:
1. Choose the themes well so that they are not confused with each other, that is, if we have a section for children’s t-shirts, there will not be one for boys, one for babies and one for girls.
2. Make good use of folders, that is, have a main folder where you can hang the rest of the content, such that:
Main folder
- / black-shirts /
Secondary folders
- / black-shirts / black-shirts-man /
- / black-shirts / black-shirts-woman / ».
- / black-shirts / black-shirts-boy /
- / black-shirts / black-shirts-girl /
- / black-shirts / baby-black-shirts /
In this way, if someone searches only for “black shirts”, Google will identify our main folder “/ black-shirts /” as the best result to show.
5. Excessive use of labels
The original idea of tags is to group content on a topic in one place so that the user can easily find related content , but it has become a system to try to position the more words the better. What we generate with this is a huge duplicate content problem, since by creating many tags for the same article, we are creating a lot of pages that only contain that article.
My advice is to use the right tags to make things easier to find , not to attract SEO traffic, which I know from experience is not possible. Think of one thing, if you already have that keyword in the title, why do you need a label exactly the same?