In the industry that we are in, we see hundreds of websites each week. After looking at websites in relation to how they have (or haven’t) been optimised you begin to recognise the common mistakes that are made. This can be because website owners are attempting to do the work themselves or even sometimes because they have opted to use an inexperienced or cheap SEO company.
The most frequent mistakes that we see include:
Targeting the Wrong Keywords
Believe it or not, this is a common problem that we see happening too regularly. The reason that this is a frequent problem is because website owners have an idea of what their target keywords should be as a result of the products that they sell or the industry that they’re in. However, these may not be the keywords that internet users are typing into search engines in high volumes to warrant the word or phrase being optimised for.
For example, we could optimise the SpeedySEO website for “Search Engine Optimisation Consultancy in Chelmsford”, however the search volume is negligible in comparison to say “SEO Essex,” and consequently we could potentially be missing out on valuable business just because we have not researched and analysed our market correctly.
Incorrectly Completing the Meta Tags
The Meta Tags field are there so that search engine robots can crawl websites and find out what content is on the webpage in question. This information can be extremely valuable in terms of SEO, especially as Google has returned to placing greater weighting on the on-site SEO in its latest update.
There are three dominant fields that should be unique and completed for each webpage that requires indexing by search engines. These are the:
- Meta Title which must contain the primary keyword that the SEO campaign is targeting.
- Meta Description which should be a combination of explaining the products or services on offer along with a clear call to action. The page description will contribute towards creating the snippet that is displayed in the search engine results pages.
- Meta Keywords which should be relevant to the content on the webpage and although there is an on going dispute over their relevancy, it is advised that they are completed. For more information on this debate, see our earlier blog post on The Importance of Keywords.
Lack of HTML Alternative for Flash and Silverlight Websites
The opportunity to create websites that are made using Rich Internet Applications (RIA) such as Flash and Silverlight can make a website more appealing as opposed to HTML. However, the common error that is either overlooked or forgotten about is that when websites are created using these methods it is imperative that the content is also written in a static format, this is so that search engines can see what content is on the website and ranks it accordingly.
Over Dependency of Buttons for Images and Headers
In an attempt to make websites more visually appealing some webmasters have a tendency to replace buttons, menus and page headers with images. Visually they can look better, but this can come at the expense of the SEO as the search engine robots cannot distinguish what the buttons are displaying. To improve the ranking of a website, it is better to replace these buttons and make use of the h1 and h2 tags which can be customised using CSS to make them more appealing.
Poorly Constructed Backlinks
Backlinks are fundamental in the SEO process and this is something that we have discussed in the earlier post, The Importance of Backlinks. Obtaining a relevant backlink is good but to increase it value, firstly make sure that the link is not “nofollow” which informs search engines that the link cannot be used to influence your websites ranking in the search engine. Secondly where permissible the anchor text, which is the clickable text of the link, should be the keyword that a website is trying to be optimised for. These will aid the SEO efforts and help develop the authority and relevance of the website.
These are just five common SEO mistakes that we see on a regular basis that can easily be avoided, but why run the risk of falling into these traps when you can just get us to do the work for you?!
