Jun 10
5
Common SEO Mistakes
There are many websites created by business owners who had little if any real knowledge of how to make a page that is search engine friendly. Most errors are just poor usage of SEO entities and are easily remedied. Here are some of these major mistakes made in the creation of a web page.
Title Tag. Do not use a keyword more than once within the title tag. You should definitely have the most important keyword for that particular page in the title tag. Do not simply put your company name here.
Keyword Density. The usual snafu here is using a keyword over and over with the assumption that the more you use it the better you will be. Wrong, entirely wrong. Use all of your keywords at the correct keyword density and you’ll do well, above that or below it, you’ll not do so well.
No Site Map: It is very important to provide an XML sitemap for the engines to find all of your pages. Not including all of your pages, or having errors in the syntax, are major blunders.
Multiple Usage of H1 Tag. The original of the heading tags was very similar to how an outline would be setup. The H1 being the largest would be the title. H2 next smallest would be a sub heading. H3 is still bold, but about average text size. You should get the idea. Heading tags run from 1 to 6 with the smallest size used for footnotes or other instances that require a small font. Use the H1 tag only once in any given page.
Duplicate Meta Tags. This is easy to fix. Create a unique set of meta tags for every page that you create.
Anchor Text: Having duplicate anchor text is a missed opportunity. Having every page of a large site link to “Home” does not help any in defining the home page. Use a keyword, or phrase, and change it up from page to page. In a large site it’s OK to have repeats, but don’t have them all be repeats. Mix it up!
Code Attributes: It is important to keep your code clean and correct. Using code attributes is all part of proper HTML coding. Whenever you use an image tag be sure to include the code attributes that go with it.
Redirects: Always use a 301 redirect, it’s a permanent redirect and is the only one recognized as correct by the search engines. Other methods such as javascript or meta refresh are not accepted methods to redirect.
No CSS: Learn how to properly use CSS so that you can remove all of that HTML code from your pages.
Large Javascript Code: I frown upon javascript, but if you must, try and remove it from the files themselves by having separate .js files that you can call for in the beginning of the page.
There are many things that SEO challenged webmasters do that hold their pages back from being listed well. I have covered many of the more popular mistakes made. You can overcome these issues with some basic SEO training. If you spend some time learning optimization it will go a long way towards getting listed on page one instead of page 101. Learning how to optimize is not a huge process, it’s a lot of common sense, but it is a long process of trial and error if you take on the chore yourself. Take an SEO training course and cut the time to learn optimization techniques down to a minimum.
