When you’ve been doing SEO for as long as we have, it’s only expected that after a while, you begin to notice a pattern in the types of mistakes that you tend to find on your prospective clients’ websites. To be sure, part of the reason why we don’t offer pre-priced SEO packages is because we genuinely believe that each clients’ needs are unique. But there is no harm in admitting that during many of our initial free SEO evaluations, we generally start off by looking for specific mistakes simply because experience tells us that your website probably has them.
To help your website stand out from the crowd, we put together a list of three common SEO mistakes, why they are hurting your search engine rankings, and what to do about it.
WWW/non-WWW Canonical Problem
Despite popular belief, from a technical perspective, https://www.webheadinteractive.com, https://www.webheadinteractive.com/index.php, and https://www.webheadinteractive.com are actually not the same website. Although most search engines are sophisticated enough to realize that your main website and its non-www counterpart are not two separate pages with duplicate content, it’s worth your time to pick a single URL and set up 301 permanent redirects from all of the other URL variations. With a 301 redirect, if someone links to your page using a URL other than the one that you usually use, you run no risk of losing valuable link juice, i.e. link ranking power.
Setting up a 301 redirect is usually an easy technical modification. If you need help, ask your web developer, search online, or hire Webhead to do it for you!
Not Including Keywords in the Page Title
Your page title is the second most important on-page optimization factor (overall content is first), and is prime real estate for your primary and secondary keywords. It shows up as the main link on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s).
Notice that rather than writing “Webhead Interactive” or “Welcome to Webhead”, our title includes the high-level keywords that we are targeting, i.e. “Tampa SEO”, “Tampa Search Engine Optimization”, and “Florida SEO”. Independent tests have also shown that the earlier the keyword appears in the title, the better. That said, feel free to include your company name in the title for branding purposes, but if you are just starting out, the recommended title structure is:
Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Company Name
Most search engines truncate a title that is too long (see the ellipses in the screenshot above), so try to keep it under 65 characters wherever possible. Use this website to calculate the number of characters.
Ignoring Image Alt Tags
Despite rapid advances in semantic technology, for now and the foreseeable future, search engines can’t read text embedded within images. Unfortunately, if the search engine “spider” can’t read the text, it can’t understand it, and if it can’t understand it, it has a hard time deciding if the image is relevant to the user’s search query. This problem is especially acute for photography blogs and websites that contain a large number of infographics.
Fortunately, one can provide a text-based description of the image within the website code using the so-called “alt” tag. From an SEO perspective, it’s helpful to make sure that the image descriptions are keyword-enriched, i.e. they contain the relevant keywords that you are targeting. Very few websites that we evaluate have properly coded alt tags, and of those that do, virtually none have tags that are SEO-optimized.
Have you checked your own website for the three common mistakes outlined above? If so, have you seen an increase in your search engine ranking performance? Discuss in the comments below!