9 Obstacles To Your SEO That Might Be Hiding

9 SEO Obstacles That Might Be Hiding

Within SEO, there are a number of obstacles that might not be apparent when running an optimization campaign.  These issues come about when there’s a lack of technical or strategic optimization.  In this article,  I’m going to go over the what these obstacles are and what measures you can take to make sure you’re optimization is effective.

1)  Excessive-Optimization

Otherwise known as “keyword stuffing”, excessive optimization results when you overload your content with a hyperdensity of keywords.  So how do you know when you’ve reached this point with your keywords?  The easiest way is to just use the “eyeball test”; if a piece of content is readable and informative then it most likely hasn’t been overly optimized.

On the other hand, if a page looks like it was put together for the sole purpose of SEO, then you could have a problem with Google because while Google rewards sites that it trusts as a credible source of information, it punishes in its rankings those that it doesn’t.

2)  Not Enough Quality Links

The cornerstone of Google’s search ranking algorithm, quality links effectively serve as a “thumbs up” for your site.  The more thumbs up you’ve got, the higher in the rankings you’ll climb.  You do want to be careful about where your links are coming from.

Google rewards sites with links from credible sites, so if your links are coming from “link farms”, they won’t be worth much of anything. Additionally, don’t neglect haves a few outbound links to respected and relevant sites, Google will recognize these too and reward you for it.

3)  Poor Website Design

Site visitors don’t like complicated, difficult-to-use websites and neither does Google.  What is liked and rewarded though are site designs that are intuitive, simple sites that make it easy for site visitors and Google’s “spiders” to navigate through a website.

By analyzing a website’s structure, Google can determine whether or not it makes sense if it doesn’t your site could take a tumble down the rankings.  A website’s structure can be easily modified though for better optimization simply by installing a free plugin, so it’s easy to make some fixes if you need to.

4)  Sluggish Loading Times

The web has seriously altered our expectations when it comes to how fast we should get access to something we want.  Google understands this and factors a site’s loading time into its ranking criteria.

So obviously you want to keep your site up to speed and there are a couple of ways to do this; you can remove unneeded loading galleries (flash or 3rd party) or, if that doesn’t work, you can hire a developer to actually rebuild your site with fresh, clean code.

 5)  Failure To Provide Original Content

You’ve probably already heard it a million times, but in the online marketing world, ‘content is king’.  Google’s search engines reward sites that provide fresh, unique writing content, and if you’re putting up too much-recycled information, you’ll take a hit in the rankings.

So the answer is simple, provide plenty of well-written, original content with a sprinkle of SEO optimization and you’ll be in great shape.

6)  Competition

Unfortunately, many genres are dominated by just a handful of industry giants.  So when you’re just coming onto the scene – or even trying to knock out one of these giants – it’s crucial to know what your competitors are doing correctly and what they’re not.

In many cases, it will be a small group of major players who are battling it out for the top keywords in a given industry.  These giants will be utilizing professional SEO experts to implement and constantly maintain their site’s keyword search optimization, thus making it very difficult for a newbie to take one of these juggernauts down. However, you can work around this issues by performing an analysis of your competition.

By seeing which keywords are successful and which words struggle in the rankings, you’ll be able to locate lanes of opportunity in which you can focus on the optimization of the keywords that aren’t being utilized effectively by your competition.  This allows you to secure an advantage in particular niche areas and become a leader in them.

7)  Misleading Page Titles

Google loves to see site pages where the titles accurately reflect the content.  After all, titles are what draws readers in.  Your goal should be to create descriptive, compelling titles with a sprinkle of optimization.

And be accurate, Google frowns on putting irrelevant keywords into article titles and misleading your readers isn’t a great way to keep their trust either.

8)  Not Including XML Sitemaps

You want to have your ever-changing content and site pages properly and fully indexed by Google, and without XML sitemaps, that won’t happen.

So make sure your site optimization includes an XML map; doing so will allow your new content to be discovered and quickly indexed.  And don’t worry about the technical aspects, XML sitemaps can be installed quickly and are easy to develop.

9)  New Websites

This one is pretty much unavoidable since every website is new at some point.  However, it seems to take more time for new sites to move up the ranking than it does for one that’s been around for a while.

One theory as to why this happens is that Google tends to “sandbox” new sites for a while as a way to constrain massive link surges that a new site might tactically employ.  But regardless of whether or not Google employs such a tactic, it is clear that generally speaking, newer sites have fewer links at that prevents them from making a dent in the rankings early on.

To deal with this issue, get your website up and running and then gradually grow your links as you build your audience.

Conclusion

Once spotted, most hidden optimization obstacles are fairly easy to fix. Just stick with the time-proven SEO fundamentals, create killer content, promote your site and keep an eye on your analytics; do all that and you’ll be moving up the rankings before you know it.