The Top 5 SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid them

Having analysed many websites we are constantly being asked to identify some of the common SEO mistakes that are made.

This is a collection of the most common pitfalls that we see along with recommendations to avoid them.

The most common by far is:

1: Bad Page Titles

Every html document must have a TITLE Element in the head section. This can be up to 230 characters long.

Page titles or TITLE elements (Also called title tags), are one of the most important factors when developing a search engine friendly web page.

By far the most common problem that we find at Interleado from analysing websites are title tags that are too long or not containing important keywords

The solution:

• The page title should be no more than 60 characters long
• Make sure your keywords are positioned at the start
• Do not have more than 3 keywords per page title
• Include a reference to the pages main content theme within the first 5 words and if you repeat a keywords, do not do so not more than once later in the title

The reason for this is that spiders only really consider approximately the first 60 characters of a title. Plus they are programmed to watch out for keyword stuffing.

Here is an example of a title page of the Interleado blog.

<title>seo software for professionals from Interleado</title>

It’s simple. The keywords are contained within the first two words of the title and the company name also appears. The total length is 46 characters.

To illustrate how not to create a page title look at the following example:

<title>seo software, intelligent seo software, seo reports, seo tool for web professionals, seo software for website owners</title>

The problems with this are as follows:

• The page title is obviously using keyword stuffing – a practice of repeating keywords too many times can result in having a penalty applied by the search engines with a much lower ranking.
• Also the number of characters used is 116. This is a waste of space as the spiders will only read around 60 characters
• The company name is not present which will make it difficult for the site to be found by searching on company name.

2. Poor Internal Links

The easier you make it for a search engine to see all pages on your website, the easier it is for them to give more authority to all your web pages, not just your home page. The more difficult you make it to access all your information the harder you make it for the search engines to see you as relevant!

What Can You Do?

Make sure that your home page links to your most important pages and that your most important pages link to each other. For example, the diagram below shows how to get the best visibility for your pages.

Also, when you are linking from page to page, ensure that you use a text link and use your keywords in the link,
e.g. Instead of saying, ‘and here you will find our most popular products’ write it like,

‘and the old mahogany chest is among our favourite products’. You can see the difference here, in the first example you are putting more emphasis on the word ‘here‘, but in the second you are putting more emphasis on one of your keywords, ‘old mahogany chest‘ and because you are using the keyword as the link text, this adds even more value.

3. Poor Keyword Selection

Often due to an understandable eagerness to get started with seo, little or no formal keyword research is done. This can lead to choosing very popular keywords with tons of competition and little chance of success or keywords that no one is searching on. The trick is to select keywords that are reasonably popular with searchers but not too difficult to get good ranking for.

A previous blog post titled How to Do Keyword Research and Testing! Has some useful advice to help conduct keyword research

4. Poor Description Tags

The description is sometimes used by the search engines when they display results in a search engine results page. So, in terms of its importance , if people like what they see in the description they are more likely to click into your website.

The search engines don’t give a lot of weight to this tag, but they do look at it and notice the words you have in relation to what you have on your web page. If you are not using this tag at all, or if you have duplicated the same description tag all over your website, you should make the effort and make some changes.

If you look at your description tag for any web page on your website, simply click on ‘View’ – ‘Page Source’ or just ‘Source’ from the menu on your browser, look for the following text:

<meta content=”some example text in here” />

What You Should Be Looking For:

• Do you have any text in the description?
• Do you have the same text in all the description tags for each webpage?
• Have you used any of my keywords in the description tag?
• Is your description tag longer than 250 characters?

What Can You Do

Guidelines for writing a good description tag are as follows:

1. Do not repeat your exact title tag content.
2. Your most important keywords should be placed at the beginning of your meta tag description
3. Use both the singular and plural version of your keyword if possible
4. Do not repeat your keywords too often, 2-3 times is more than enough
5. If this description appeared in a search engine results page the objective would be to get people to click on your link.
   So, write your description tag in a manner that entices people in, words like, learn more… see more… read more…discover…
6. Don’t just put in a list of keywords, make the words meaningful to a human reader
7. If you are going to add your company name in the description tag, unless it is a keyword, put it at the end.
8. You should keep your tag to a maximum length of between 200-250 characters (with spaces).

5. Poor Header Tags

H1 tag is a Html heading. A heading defines the title of your text in your web-page; it can be used to define a web-page, a paragraph or a section. H1 tag is the most important heading in your web-page. The Html code is as follows: < h1 >Insert your text< /h1 >

There are many headings: H1, H2… up to H6. H1 defines the largest heading (top level heading) and H6 defines the smallest heading. Each heading should contain relevant keywords that define the content of the web-page, paragraph or section.

What Can You Do

The guidelines for writing good H1 tags are as follow:

• Use one H1 tag per web-page.
• If you have several paragraphs or sections in your web-page use a heading for each one: H1 for the first paragraph or section, H2 for the second one, H3 for the third one… up to H6! But remember that search engines are more likely to give greater weight to keywords in the H1 tag than H6 tag.
• Insert keywords that define the content of your web-page, section or paragraph

H2 up to H6 tags are Html headings. A heading defines the title of a paragraph in a web-page. H2-H6 tags are used when you have several paragraphs in your web-page.

The html code is as follows:
< h1 >Title of the web-page or 1st paragraph< /h1 >
< h2 >Title of the 2nd paragraph< /h2 >
< h3 >Title of the 3rd paragraph< /h3 >
< h4 >Title of the 4th paragraph< /h4 >
< h5 >Title of the 5th paragraph< /h5 >
< h6 >Title of the 6th paragraph< /h6 >

What Can You Do?

The guidelines for writing good H2-H6 tags are as follow:

• Use each heading only once.
  Ex: if you have already used a H2 tag, use a H3 tag and so on.
• Insert keywords that define the content of your paragraphs

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