By Daniel D Dwase

After developing your website and giving every effort to promote it across search engines, the ultimate result you want is to get high SEO rankings and receive huge volumes of traffic.

Sometimes, despite all your efforts to increase your visibility across search engines, you may not notice desirable outcome for your website.

While many would wonder what went wrong, few could trace out the reason thereof. It never hurts to be aware of them to avoid the consequences rather than regret and go in for a postmortem.

Here are some of the potential triggers that could wreck havoc on your website rankings.

1. Wrong Keywords Application

The worst thing you can do to your online business is to select the wrong keywords for your site.

Sometimes it happens due to ignorance and sometimes it is due to wrong keywords research techniques.

Whatever the reason, any error in selection of keywords can make a sea of difference to your SEO rankings because keywords are your key to success in search engines.

With the increasing competition in online advertising, where every webmaster is particularly concerned about minute detail on their website, missing this most important factor can definitely harm your site's ranking in search engines.

2. Ignoring The Meta Tags

With the major search engines growing more sophisticated, Meta Tags are losing their importance. However, you must not forget that Meta Tags still matter.

If you ignore your 'Meta Description' part, you lose a chance of providing brief information about your page to search engines and visitors as well.

'Meta Description' is another factor that increases your ranking in search engines.

'Meta Keyword' is also considered by all the major search engines. Moreover, ignoring the meta tags you lose your chance to promote your keywords in search engines. (See "SEO Optimization Tips: Strategies to Get You Started!" for more information)

3. Improper Title Tags

'Title tag' of your webpage has a direct and significant effect on the SEO rankings of that page.

When Title tag is not developed in an SEO friendly way, chances are high that search engines will neglect your site for ranking despite having a highly optimized content.

As search engines first evaluate the title of the page for the presence of keywords, the title without targeted keywords of your page bears no value.

4. Bad Linking Strategy

Without quality inbound links to your site, it is difficult to think of getting high rankings in major search engines.

Your linking strategy highly affects your relevance and reliability on the web. Getting links from irrelevant sites, link farms and other bad neighbourhood means your site doesn't value much for the search engines.

Any attempt with linking to manipulate search engines can drown you by taking your site down in search engines.

Apart from worthless inbound links, excessive outbound links, cross linking, pixel linking are other factors that can harm your SEO rankings. (See "How to Generate More Inbound Links" for more information)

5. Dull & Dubious Website Content

The most important aspect of your website is the content, and, if you ignore this part or take any wrong decision while developing content for your website, it will definitely reflect on your position on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Picking copyrighted content illegally from other sites is a serious crime which may result in a penalty for your site.

Similarly, search engines don't like duplicated content. Wrong use of keywords on your webpage is also responsible for not getting success in search engines.

Invisible text, doorway pages, cloaking are other factors that negatively affects your search engine positioning.

6. Badly-Optimized URL

Search engine spiders don't prefer dynamic URLs. Long dynamic URLs are not SEO-friendly, sometimes they make it to top rankings though.

In case it is essential to use dynamic URLs, its better using a tool to rewrite the dynamic URLs for better SEO rankings.

If you are not using your site's keywords in your URL you are again losing a chance to get better attention from search engines.

7. Weak Website Design

Have you used flash or Java script for designing and developing your website? Well, it may be attractive for your visitors, but not effective when considered from SEO perspective.

Search engines can't crawl sites with flash and find it difficult to rank the pages with flash.

Also, search engines may find it difficult to visit the internal pages if the internal linking of your site is not developed properly.

If you find any of the above factors present on your website, role up your sleeves to get rid of them as soon as possible and boost your SEO rankings.

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