SEO Errors – Common Mistakes in Search Engine Optimisation

By Jason Eichner

It’s hard to keep up with SEO best practices these days. The dominant search engine algorithms are obtuse and hard to understand, and it seems like every day a new SEO requirement is released.

I’m going to try and remove some of the arcane wording from SEO, and reveal some of the most critical SEO mistakes that are made and how to correct them today.

Not Following Standard SEO Practices

As I said in my SEO Essentials Guide, there are some things you should do with every website to improve their SEO.

In brief, this includes always using unique and significant meta-titles and meta-descriptions, having a mobile friendly version of the site available, and using your focus keywords in your titles and copy.

It’s extremely important to do all of these things, as they all have a significant impact on SEO rankings across multiple search engines and algorithms. Take a look through the guide for more details on these SEO best practices.

Slow Load Times

This can be a frustrating one, as you often won’t have direct control over the speed of your site, but it is important to try and make your site as quick to load as possible.

There are typically two big factors that can slow down your website, assuming there’s no broken scripts putting load on the server. The first can be solved with a web designer, and that’s high-load pages. This is when the page itself takes a long time to load, due to any number of reasons including large file sizes, uncompressed scripts, and no use of caching on the site. A good web developer can quickly tell you whether this is what is slowing down your website.

The other possibility is that your site is being throttled by your hosting company, or else your hosting company doesn’t have good speeds to begin with. Many hosting companies sell a cheap hosting package with sever throttling in place, so that even simple websites take a long time to load up, and then offer a more expensive and faster package to frustrated customers. Look into the reputation of the hosting companies in your budget area, and avoid any you find out are frequently accused of throttling websites.

Poor Domain Naming

A problem that often strikes too late to be resolved, it is good to be aware of this problem when considering buying new domains. Look at your domain name, and consider if there are any aspects of the name that, taken out of context, could get the domain added to a blacklist or firewall.

It’s often invisible. An example I encountered recently was a company who had purchased a domain with “Sussex” in the name, not realising that said domain name thus also included the sequence of letters spelling “sex”, and thus were immediately added to multiple blacklists that filter out adult websites. While this may not directly impact your SEO, getting added to blacklists means less legitimate visitors and traffic, and less trustworthy links leading to your site, meaning a drop in reputation in search engine rankings.

Not Using Social Media

Social media and SEO, while both very important for the success of a modern business, don’t appear as though they are especially linked. This is not the case however – using social media correctly can directly improve your search rankings.

While not using social media can be bad in its own right, as I discussed in my Getting Started With Social Media Guide, a recent study found that the more social media activity a site or page had, the higher it ranked in searches. The effect is incremental and small, but a successful post can have great effects, and this ranking improvement can accumulate into something significant.

Bad Image Tagging

This is a commonly overlooked problem, but it’s vital to properly tag images on your website. The two important tags to look out for are Title tags and Alt tags.

Alt tags are seen instead of the image on the page. That means if, for whatever reason, the image does not or cannot load, the text is shown instead. While some assume that alt tags are never seen, it is important to remember that many people do not see the images on your page. Security conscious people or those with slow internet may disable images from loading using scripts; but more important screen readers for the sight impaired use the alt tag to tell the user what they would otherwise be seeing, so it is important to always include your alt tags.

Title tags, on the other hand, are visible along with an image. Most common browsers will show the title tag text when you hover your mouse over the image. This tag is meant to be used to provide additional useful information about the image, or otherwise compliment it.

Both tags are important to SEO; so make sure you go through your website and all your pictures include alt and title tags. Remember – using the same keywords too much on a page can trigger alerts for search engine web crawlers and actually lower your ranking instead of increasing it, so be careful with your keywords.

That’s all for this time, friends. If you’re interested in improving your SEO contact us and we’d be happy to help.

SEO Errors – Common Mistakes in Search Engine Optimisation

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