Common Website Mistakes Made by 1st-Time Webmasters

So, you’re planning to launch your first website? Whether your goal is to sell a product, sell a service, or just establish greater recognition for your respective brand, a website can help you achieve these goals and more. However, you’ll want to avoid making the following website mistakes.

Choosing a Highly Competitive Niche

One all-too-common mistakes made by first-time webmasters is choosing a highly competitive niche. Competition can be sign of “potential,” as it indicates there’s demand for a product or service. But if there’s too much competition in a particular niche, you’ll have a difficult time trying to make a name for yourself.

Ideally, your website should be focused around a high-traffic, low-competition niche. Use a keyword analytics tool like the Adwords Keyword Planner to help uncover niche ideas for your website.

Using Free Web Hosting Services

Web hosting isn’t a service that should you try to cut costs with. There are several different “free” web hosts available, but this is one instance in which the mantra “you get what you pay for” holds true.

Sure, they may host your website for free, but they may also display annoying advertisements on your site in an effort to generate revenue. Furthermore, many of these free web hosting services have strict limits on data storage and bandwidth, making them virtually useless once your site has amassed any significant amount of daily traffic.

Not Backing Up Your Website

Whether it’s free or paid, you shouldn’t rely in your web hosting service to create regular backups of your website. Some web hosts will create backups for their clients and customers, assuming it’s within their data limitations, but others will not.

Without a backup copy of your website on hand, you could be forced to start back at square one in the event of a data loss or hack attack. So to prevent this from happening, try to get into the habit of backing up your website at least once per week, saving it to a secure location (not on your web host, obviously).

Publishing the Same Content in Multiple Locations

It’s estimated that roughly 30% of the entire Internet consists of duplicate content. Whether it’s excerpts, quotes, legal jargon, or full articles taken from other sources, duplicate content is rampant. As a webmaster, you should avoid publishing the same content in multiple locations of your site.

If the same blog post or article is published in two or more locations, how will the search engines know which version to index? This leads to greater confusion, hurting your efforts to obtain a high search ranking.

What website mistakes were you guilty of making? Let us know in the comments section below!