Everyone wants to head up the search engine results, but with such fierce competition, only the fittest can hope to survive. Increase your chances of hitting that elusive top spot by avoiding these nine common pitfalls:
1 Slow loading times
Nobody wants to wait while your site loads, no matter how good it looks once it gets there. Time is money in the fast-paced world of the internet, so speed up your site or suffer the consequences
2 No site map
Make it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for. A site map puts control into the visitor’s hands, which is where it should be.
3 Failed canonical tags
Most websites have multiple pages, and a canonical check can endorse these and rule out duplicates. If you’re not comfortable with this sort of work, help is available from seasoned professionals up and down the country. So if you’re in need of SEO in Dublin or Doncaster, look for friendly and helpful teams such as http://www.rycomarketing.ie/ to clean up your website and make it more efficient.
4 No image descriptions
Tagging your images may seem a pointless exercise, but it can have a profound effect on your SEO results. According to Practical Ecommerce, the ‘alternative attributes’ or ‘alt’ tag not only assists visually impaired visitors to your site but also attracts the favourable attention of search engine web crawlers too.
5 Keyword spamming
Adding keywords is a fine art – too many, and the search engines list you as a ‘spam’ site, too few, and search engines simply won’t notice your site.
6 No header tags
Search engines simply love well-ordered content, and this includes using appropriate and relevant header tags wherever possible throughout your content.
7 Inadequate metadata
The information contained in your website’s metadata needs to be unique and catchy enough to encourage visitors to click for more information. Never neglect this important aspect of your website.
8 Poor link naming
Writing ‘click here’ on link text is a waste of a valuable SEO resource. Write relevant link copy to attract those search engine robots, and persuade them to rank your site even higher.
9 Duplicate content
The larger your website, the greater the likelihood of inadvertently including duplicate pages. Search engine robots don’t like these, so fix them as soon as you notice them.
