The 6 Most Common Website SEO Mistakes

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Dominick Green
6 years ago
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1 The 6 Most Common Website SEO Mistakes

2 The 6 Most Common Website SEO Mistakes One of the most important weapons when it comes to expanding your business is a good website and whilst lots of websites look great to the human eye they may not look so great to major search engines. In fact search engines may struggle to understand what your business even does. We speak to Worldpay Benefits Club partner Click to Submit, CEO, Andrew Thomas to find out the 5 most common mistakes businesses make which when fixed can result in a significant uplift in organic traffic visiting your website. 1. Page title - Home is not where your site lives Click to Submit, conducted a survey and found that amazingly 23% of home pages had the page title of just the word home. There are over 650 million websites online. This indicates approximately 143 million websites have the page title home on their index page, making the word home probably the most competitive keyword on Google. Although your home page title or title tag may not be "home" it still may not be descriptive enough. Title tags are part of the Meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML in the <head> area. The title tag is the most crucial single tag in your page because it tells the search engines and the users what the page is about. It appears in bold when your content is published on the search results page, so it needs to be a concise, explanatory description of the pages content. It should be around 6500 characters in length with the most important keywords towards the front, in order to entice users to your site.

3 2. Indexable content When piecing together your website, it s important to make sure all the most important parts are written in HTML format. This will allow the spiders to see and index the content of your website easily. Too often we see sites that make sense to the human eye but to the search engines make no sense. A few tips to consider are: Image Alt tags: Although search engine crawlers are pretty advanced these days, it s still not possible for them to recognise images. Make sure any image uploaded on your site has an alt attribute in HTML so that search engines have a written description of it. If you have any video or audio content on your website, provide a transcript for it. You don t have to mirror the content word for word, but select the key sentences you want to be picked up by the search engines. When a site is flash or uses java plugins, it s difficult for the search engines to find any information that would deem your site relevant enough to rank, so supplement them with text.

3. Keyword usage and targeting Keyword usage and targeting is still part of the search engines ranking algorithms, so it s key to ensure your keywords are used regularly and implemented strategically.

4 3. Keyword usage and targeting Keyword usage and targeting is still part of the search engines ranking algorithms, so it s key to ensure your keywords are used regularly and implemented strategically. For example,if you want your page to rank in the search results for car sales in London ; you want the phrase Car sales in London to be part of the crawlable content of your site. The search engines will measure how, and how often, keywords are used on each page in order to determine the sites relevancy and calculate its rank. It s not advised to lump all your important keywords in a box at the bottom of your page, as we see so often. They need to be incorporated in the rest of the text informatively. Don t worry, this is pretty easy; you can place the phrase in the Title tag, in the URL, two or three times in the content and voila, you re there! 4. Site map and crawlable content Assembling a XML sitemap and ensuring the internal links of your site are easily crawlable for spiders will really help your SEO. An XML sitemap is not to be confused with an HTML site map. The latter is designed for the human and the former plays a significant role in helping search engines read, crawl and know which pages of your website to index. This doesn't have to be a list of every page of your website, just include the ones you d like to appear in search.

5. URL structures (addresses for files on the web) Poorly structured URL s are a common issue for SEO and can negatively impact your ranking if not structured coherently.

5 5. URL structures (addresses for files on the web) Poorly structured URL s are a common issue for SEO and can negatively impact your ranking if not structured coherently. Search engines look for keywords in URLs to help them determine their rankings, so if your page name matches a keyword/ phrase input by a user, your site will most likely rank higher on the search results. This does not mean you can stuff your URL with as many keywords as possible; it needs to read well and descriptively. This will benefit your SEO and also the user s experience. 6. Duplicate content Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. With a number of similar content management systems and template driven sites now available on the Internet, duplicate content is common and a problem for SEO and search engines. This is mainly because search engine spiders aren t advanced enough to determine which URL they should index and rank. However, there are a few ways to help the search engines and save yourself. Most commonly used is a 301 redirect, which will forward one URL to another. However, a better and far easier method would be to use a Canonical tag. This can be inserted into the head of the page that contains duplicate content and will point the crawler to the master URL that you want to rank well. By including canonical in the URL, it lets them know the page is the copy.

6 This material is for information purposes only of the intended recipient. We have taken care in the preparation of this information but will not be responsible for any losses or damages including loss of pro ts, indirect, special or consequential losses arising as a result of any information in this document or reliance on it (other than in respect of fraud or death or personal injury caused by negligence). Terms and conditions apply to all our services. The content of this material may not be reproduced without prior consent of Worldpay. Worldpay (UK) Ltd (Company NO /FCA No ). Registered o ce: Walbrook Building, 25 Walbrook, London, EC4N 8AF. Worldpay (UK) Ltd is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations 2009 for the provision of payments services and is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority for consumer credit activities. Worldpay, the logo and any associated brand names are the trade marks of the Worldpay group of companies.

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