5 SEO Mistakes Anybody Can Avoid
Whether you own a small three page hobbyist website or a monster E-commerce store there are several things you can check to ensure you are not placing any barriers in the way of your search engine optimisation campaign.
Below you will find the 5 most commonly checked areas when a website is critiqued by an outsider. Any webmaster has the ability to check these and, depending on your content management system, you should be able to fix them.
- Duplicate Titles
- Content Duplication
- Blocking Your Website
- Non-Crawlable Navigation
- XML Sitemaps
As the search engines rely on your tag to tell them what the page on your website is about, it’s imperative that each page on your website has a unique tag.
You can check this manually by browsing your website, or you can simply go to Google and do a search for site:yourdomain.com. If you see duplicate titles then it’s time to collate a list of pages on your website that need their titles changed.
Following on from the duplicate title check it’s also imperative that you have unique content. Until recently this was unavoidable for pages that carried “print-friendly” versions but with the implementation of the rel=”canonical tag you are able to specify the URL that you would like the search engines to credit as the unique content.
By using the site:yourdomain.com operator again you can spot duplicate content. However, you may find that browsing your website manually will give you a better insight.
This is a “doh!” tip, but you would be surprised how many times this comes up. Have you had your website developed recently or has it just been launched?
Check in your source code if your developers have left in there, and more importantly, have they left content=”noindex,nofollow” in there. If so, get this changed to “index,follow” and open the door to the search engines
Search engines rely on their spiders being able to crawl your website through navigation menus and internal linking. Is your navigation stopping them?
Many websites still utilise JavaScript navigation menus that are, quite simply, stopping the search engines crawling your website. You can check this by going to Google and using the cache:yourdomain.com and clicking Text Only Version. If you can’t see your navigation menu then you have an actionable point to work with.
Also increase your internal linking within your current website copy. The more pages that the search engines can find the more pages that your potential customers can find.
Why not help search engines know what pages your website has by giving a list of them all.
Using a free service such as xml-sitemaps.com you can create your own sitemap.xml to avoid you manually creating one. Simply upload this to your webserver and let Google, Bing and Yahoo know in their respective Webmaster Tools where your XML sitemap is.
Whilst these tips are basic in many SEO’s eyes, they are always a fantastic starting point when trying to solve the mystery of why your website might not be performing as best as you think it can be.
Kev Strong is an online marketing consultant based in the UK. Through his blog, Goosh, he provides tips, insights and amusement on most things SEO.
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30 Responses to “5 SEO Mistakes Anybody Can Avoid”
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5 SEO Mistakes Anybody Can Avoid http://tinyurl.com/243f5ts
thx 5 SEO Mistakes Anybody Can Avoid
Great list.
Here’s my #6
Seeing the website as a one-off project to do and then leave alone for 2 years. This applies to SEO, content, functionality, …
Good list, I would add –
Good fresh content
Keep on top of broken links and errors
5 SEO Mistakes Anybody Can Avoid http://bit.ly/9hCRMI
Kev –
Excellent article! There are really so many components to properly setting up a site and occasionally something is bound to slip by. I just started working with a client and could not understand why the site had not been indexed. Well, your point #3 was very helpful! I had a plugin that was causing the site to be “noindex” (follow -yes). Hopefully that will fix the issue.
Thank you again for a great article.
Theresa
5 SEO Mistakes Everyone Should Avoid http://dailyseotip.com/5-seo-mistakes-anybody-can-avoid/1064/
I agree with the duplicate titles. However its not that big of an issue. Ive had things indexed on multiple websites for the same keywords. Duplicate content isnt that big of an issue either
Hi,
Our site does not have a 301 for the non-www version. Our IT department seems unable to accomplish this.
If I put a rel=canonical tag on the home page, specifying the www version as canonical, will Google apply credit from links to the non-www to the www version?
Or should I go to Google Webmaster Tools and select a preferred domain? Is that a better way?
Are there other options I should consider?
Thanks.
Brian
I agree with duplicate titles. It’s not good because it having duplicate titles may mean that you’re writing one and the same thing. So it’s best to have unique titles for each of your post.
Good post again.Thank you for sharing, I hope you happy and wish you good luck! this helpfull information.
Good tips here for SEO beginners. Making sure your content is unique is incredibly important – don’t copy and paste from other websites – it’s incredibly easy for this to be spotted using tools such as www.copyscape.com
Thanks I created a sitemap very easily with a wordpress plugin called something like google xml sitemap!
Excellent tips, especially for beginners. I think I have made all the listed mistakes, though there are many more we could talk about
Pretty 101 don’t you think?
Thanks a lot to Kev Strong who share this information..it will give information to SEO Professional who are doing SEO Mistakes in website promotion…Keep it up..
Thanks for sharing, it is special!
Excellent read! There are really so many components to properly setting up a site and occasionally something is bound to slip by.
Nice info bro…keep in posting..muuuaccchhh
I agree with duplicate titles. It’s not good because it having duplicate titles may mean that you’re writing one and the same thing. So it’s best to have unique titles for each of your post.
Oke, its very nice from my website that on blogger head master
One of the sites I have just taken on fell foul of most of those mistakes.
They used javascript menus, every page had the same title tag (which was none of their keywords!), every page had a large chunk of duplicate content and there was no sitemap at all! On top of that there was no header tags (the designer had my their own ‘header’ class rather than using the standard H1/2/3 etc) and the pages where numbered “page56.html” etc!
Unsuprisingly after a few quick onsite SEO changes they are actually getting some traffic now!
Thanks for the tips…i m making some of these mistakes….will rectify them soon
Thanks I created a sitemap very easily with a wordpress plugin called something like google xml sitemap!
Thanks for the tips…….i agree , mostly webmaster uses duplicate titles all over the website
its not full for SEO term,but its okey for any reader and it can help also for starting an SEO worker!..
Nice share.. thanks for the tips, it’s can help for new blogger to expand their website
Yes. these are the common mistakes done by anybody while doing the SEO services. Including the above information, it is also important to concentrate on the submission. It is better to submit in good websites or directories having good page rank so that we can get the results quickly.
These mistakes are so common especially duplicate content and same key words. These are some of the things that drag your blog down and you end up with undesired results. You have put this in very simple and clear words.
I m agree with this article.Thanks for sharing your knowledge by writing this article.