If you're playing the long game you know Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important. A good SEO ranking gives you a huge advantage over other businesses. And while content is still king, web design plays a huge part in making sure your technical SEO is on point.

Here are 10 common mistakes businesses make that cause their SEO rankings to suffer:

Not including meta tags

The missing meta tags are simple things, but extremely important. The most important thing among these tags are the title and description meta tags. While on the one hand, the title meta tag is the first thing the search engines use to identify the website, the description meta tag is the link to the page you are trying to promote.

Unoptimized Images

All your images should have a filled out alt tag. This is important not just for SEO purposes but for accessibility reasons when users navigate your page.

You also want to make sure you compress your images to reduce their size so your page loads fast. Services like TinyPNG are great for this.

Not having a site map

An XML sitemap file is a list of important pages in a website. It’s the first thing the search engines will look at when they try to find and index your site. It enables the search engines to “visit” every important page in your site. Creating one is usually pretty easy but also time consuming. You should try to add a site map to your website as soon as you can.

Not having a mobile version for your website

Google has been encouraging websites to create mobile versions of their websites for some time. Now, they're actively penalizing websites that don't provide mobile versions. If you don't have a mobile version of your website, you will likely see a drop in your traffic rankings.

Overdone Animations

While we all love animations, if you add too much of it to your website, you will hurt your SEO rankings.

Poorly Targeted Keywords

Is it possible to have too many keywords in your website? The answer is yes. If your website contains too many keywords in the wrong places, you will miss out on traffic that is looking for your product or services. If your keyword is specific to a certain search phrase, you will likely only get traffic for that specific search term, rather than a variety of search terms.

Small Header Tags

Google uses header tags to determine the topic of your website. They want to know what your website is all about. If your header tags are too short, Google will not be able to determine your website's topic.

Too many Ads Above-The-Fold

Google has stated that "page-wide ads" are being penalized. The term "page-wide ad" refers to ads that are above the fold and take up more than 30% of the page. This means that if your website has banner ads or sidebar ads that are taking up large portions of the webpage, you will likely lose traffic.

Links Above The Fold

Google also has penalized websites that have too many links above the fold. This means that too many links to pages, blogs and other websites can hurt your rankings. You should only link out to other websites if they are relevant to the current page and they are the only other place you can get relevant content.

No Social Media Integration

Google has stated that they use social media to determine the reputation of a website. If your website is not on any social media, it is possible that you will lose ranking in the search engine results. The best way to integrate social media is to update your social media accounts frequently.

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