“I have been penalized”.
“My site isn’t indexed anymore”.
“I am stuck on page 3 even after building tons of links”.
“This website has gone to hell.”
Yeap! We have all been there. I own over 200 websites and when I was trying to get the hang of SEO, I did manage to get a few of my sites penalized.
But that’s OK, burning those websites gave me an example of what NOT to do in the future.
Anyway, the idea of this post today is to let you know the 5 things you need to avoid in order to make sure your website stays ranked.

1. Landing page is full of pictures and has no content:

I am actually surprised at how many clients have less than 200 words on their landing pages and expect it to rank number 1 for their (competitive) keywords. Here’s the thing: Your website needs to have content on the landing page. For websites that I am serious about, I usually have over 2000 words of unique, relevant content on the homepage.
Trust me, increasing your content will help you increase and sustain the rankings. I have tested this a bit too many times.
If your website’s homepage looks like this i.e has tons of pictures and literally no content, there’s probably a reason to worry:

Now, I must tell you that pages full of pictures and no content still do get ranked, but they require much more link building than they would if there was some decent content on the landing pages.
The solution? Add more content. But make sure it is interesting and makes sense.

2. Keyword density is off the charts:
Remember those times when all you needed to do was repeat your keyword 200 times on the same page to get ranked for it?
Well, they’re gone.
The idea here is, if your page does not read naturally and has more than a 3% keyword density, you will find it much harder to rank.
I actually hired a content writer a couple of months ago who used around 7-8% keyword density for my niche sites. It turns out that they started ranking on pages 4-9 when they were ranked on page 2 before the spammy content was added.
Once again, if your content looks like this, you can be sure your website looks ugly to the search engine spiders: