14 Common SEO Mistakes I still see being made that are easy to fix

While there is a lot of work that can be done with search engine optimisation optimising your site is one of the key parts of the process. Unbelievably there are still basic mistakes that I still see being made which can have a huge impact on how well your site can do within the search engine rankings. I was going to go for 10 but I found these 14 to be the most basic while still being useful and easy to fix usually in an afternoon of work.

1 Title tag not being used at all or properly

Google and other search engines read the title tag. This is what will appear as the clickable link on search engines that links to your site. It also reads the tag to see what the site and page are about and yet I still see too many sites with just home or index or even blank tags being used. This is such a simple thing to fix and the title tag is so important to giving search engine spiders and idea of what your site is about that this needs to be fixed.

2 http:// and http://www. not redirecting

For some reason google treats http:// and http://www. as two different sites as in a few rare cases they can be used as different domains. Set up a 301 redirect to make one redirect into the other and give your website a consistent url structure. This can involve a little research into the right 301 code to use but its a simple ftp file upload in most case or an option in your web cpanel

3 http://www. not working at all

I don't know how this still happens in this day and age but i've seen many large websites that will not load, and then I add in http://www. instead of http:// and the website works. Again get this fixed on your server you are missing a lot of traffic though this.

4 No Sitemap

A sitemap tells search engines where all your pages are and how important they are. You can generate a sitemap easily and stick it on your sever. Add this to your google webmaster account for bonus points and to help all your pages get indexed.

5 404 Page not being used properly
Set up a proper 404 page for your domain with some information and search boxes or maybe even just a redirect to your main page. Whatever you do though, set one up.

6 index.php not redirecting to main url
Make index.php redirect to your base url. This again can cause google confusion as index.php isn't always the home page. This also makes sure however people link to your main page you get all the link credit and a strong domain.

7 Bad internal linking and important pages have nowhere linking to them
Make sure all your pages are linked to from somewhere on the site. If you can't do this then create a sitemap listing all your urls and submit it to google so it finds all those extra pages you have. Google can't index what it doesn't know is there and has no way of finding.

8 No text or not enough text
Make sure there is text on your page somewhere even if its in the meta tags. Show search engines what your site is about and include your keywords somewhere.

9 Using Flash
Google is getting better at reading flash but mostly it just sees an embed code with no idea what is inside.It can't read your text and you are wasting a lot of opportunity for showing relevancy.

10 Double check your code to make sure you've got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags
Make sure you are using H1 and H2 tags correctly

11 check for robots.txt
Make sure you have a robots.txt file set up to make sure search engines crawl your site where you want and don't index what you don't want indexed.

12 add to webmaster tools
Add it to webmaster tools, set up locations, preferred urls, add a sitemap. Use this great resource to give Google a helping hand.

13 add analytics
Add some kind of analytics code so you can track traffic and keywords. Its amazing how many sites aren't even checking how many visitors they are getting a month and where they are coming from

14 use alt tags.
Use alt tags for images to make sure Google knows what the images are

Gareth Goddard SEO offers business seo to companies from around the world and can offer seo packages or bespoke seo plans for all goals and projects.

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