SEO is something we all know about, but many people just can’t get it right. So what are the most common SEO errors? Here are 5 easy to fix SEO errors that you can implement right now on your website to improve your traffic.
Whether you are brand new to SEO or your website is old and you are stuck on page 2 or 3, below are some simple errors that can help push your ranking up higher:
1. Images Not Optimized
Image optimization is one of the most common SEO issues with websites. So what does optimizing an image mean? Well there are a few things that can effect your SEO that are often easily missed. The first being missing alt attributes.
When you put an image on your website you have the option of entering an alt attribute. This is a very small descriptor of what the image is. Search engines can obviously not decipher what an image is by looking at it, so they use alt attributes to know what the image is.
If your website isn’t really image heavy this isn’t something that will improve your SEO rating much, but it is something that you can quickly implement with each new post.
Google has also started ranking sites based on page load time, and one of the number one killers is large images. There are plenty of image resize sites, or plugins to automatically optimize your website images. This will improve your page load times significantly.
You should not only ensure your images are appropriately sized and have alt attributes, but also try and ensure they are key word focused. Which brings me to point two – keywords.
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2. Focusing On The Wrong Keywords
Keywords are search terms, or words that your potentially customers may search for in a search engine. You can focus on these keywords by using them throughout your posts. So there are billions of different words and combinations, which ones do you target?
To answer that, lets first look at what you SHOULDN’T target;
- Generic keywords – for example “marketing” is a very generic keyword, and could attract many visitors to you site. But what are they looking for? Marketing services, marketing tips or marketing courses? There are so many different variables you will inadvertently bring many visitors to your site that have no interest in your product.
- Highly competitive keywords – one of the most expensive keywords when running google Adwords is insurance. Why? Insurance is a big industry, with thousands of vendors trying to make money. So everyone in that industry uses this keyword. In addition to that, because insurance is so broad people across multiple industry may target this, increasing its competition.
- Global keywords – is your product and services locality specific? Back to our marketing keyword, if we instead target “Marketing Services Texas” we would get much more geographically appropriate visitors.
As you can see, a trend is developing – be as specific as possible. Generic keywords may bring a lot of traffic to your site, but no one willing to purchase services. Taking my example from before even further we could focus on “Marketing services for Texas coffee shops”. The visitors to your site may be fewer, but it is highly targeted to the people you WANT to see your message.
Be specific. Focus on less competitive key words, also known as long tail keywords – you can read my article here to learn more about this “SEO Hacks – Long tail Keywords“
3. Not Including Keywords In Your Title Tag
When you open up a web page, the title of the page is display at the top of your browser. If you book mark a page it also uses this tag. So how does this effect SEO?
Below is an image that shows the correlation of keywords appearing in title tags vs their google ranking. As you can see the higher the position, the greater the occurrence of the keyword in the title tag.
There us mixed sentiment as to how much keywords in title tags effect your ranking, but it is clear it has some impact. SEO is more about the accumulative effect of all the elements used for rankings.
Having a keyword in a title tag may only effect your ranking by 3%. But its a very easy 3% to get and when combined with all the other small SEO tweaks you make it all adds up.
Title tags are important not only for SEO purposes, but for general website presentation and ease. As mentioned earlier your page title is displayed whenever the link is shared. So if it is descriptive and informative, this can help attracting visitors. Every page should have a unique title, and not just for SEO purposes.
It is important to think of SEO from a pure ranking point of view, and also the impact the SEO changes will have on the “clickability” of your links as well.
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4. Not Having Meta Descriptions
Below is an example of a meta description. Firstly, forgetting SEO for a minute, meta descriptions are sometimes your only chance to get someone to come to your site.
When you search a keyword or phrase you are presented all the relevant sites, with a 160 page description underneath it. Think of it as a 160 word sales pitch, make it as unique and persuasive as possible.
From an SEO perspective there is a general consensus that meta descriptions are slowly becoming less important in rankings. However search engines do still crawl through this data, so including your keywords will have some impact.
Think of this fact more so in terms of “click-ability.” Whilst it may not impact much on how high you rank, it does impact on whether people click through to your website. A bad meta description may undo all your work getting onto the first page of results!
5. Using Generic Anchor Texts For Links
Most websites have a call to action throughout the body of their text, or at the end. Have you ever noticed some are simply “click here” or another generic text?
This is know as anchor text, which is essentially the clickable text on a link. From an SEO perspective, having a generic anchor text is a complete waste, and will not help improve your ranking.
Google have announced in the future they will decrease the dependence on anchor text, but for the moment it is still in an important factor in SEO.
Countless SEO experts have tackled the relevance, even testing the theory out by creating pages and seeing how they rank. One with generic anchor texts, and another with targeted SEO anchor text.
Below is a great illustration of the results of one test done on Which type of anchor text is the most effective by moz.com.
Bluesweets.com used non-keyword anchor text, whereas the other two had exact or partial matches. What you are seeing is their ranking over time, with BlueSweets having a spike then plummeting our of any rankings.
The results seem pretty clear, use keywords in your anchor text!
Now You Are An SEO Expert…
SEO can be slow, especially if you are a brand new site. The key is to be consistent, and to ensure you do all the little easy things every time. Over time the accumulation of great SEO techniques will pay off with a page one listing.
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