Search Engine Optimization, although only a piece of what we help people do, seems to be the most common challenge that causes people to initially seek our help. It’s also the thing that people seem most confused about, as well as the thing that people make the most mistakes doing, whether they have a SEO consultant involved or not.

1. Using the same Meta tags in Title, keyword and description on all of their pages

If you have a site that offers different services it’s good to have a page for each one with DIFFERENT keywords descriptions etc.

For Example: if you are an accountant and you do tax returns, bookkeeping, financial planning etc. You should have a general home page and then other pages that target the individual things. Search Engines think you are irrelevant if you have the keyword “bookkeeping” in a page that is all about financial planning.

What many small businesses do is have meta keywords like “Accountancy, chartered account, bookkeeping, financial planning, tax returns” on every page. You need to split them up and only put keywords that are relevant to that particular page in the keyword meta tag for the page.

2. Not putting ALT text with their images

IMG -234 etc is not a useful search term! If you have images on your site use the ALT text field with relevant keywords for the description. This is good for search engines and good for people. The Alt Text field is the text you see when the image can’t be displayed. People see them sometimes when they have a certain set up on their computer and its what programs that read sites for the vision impaired use to describe the picture to people who can’t see it.

Its also what Google images use to find relevant images in that search, so relevant ALT text can improve your SEO on many levels.

NB Some websites use “images” as their menu buttons, It’s VERY important if you are doing that that you use the ALT text to name the internal link. Also, some templates use images for their graphic design, too many of those just look like a mess to the search engines and it’s probably better to re-do the whole site in a different way. ( This is what I have to do with my natural therapies site). Its easier to re-do it from the start and copy the text than to try and get in and fix it all.

3. Using too many Key-Words

You should only use between 3 and 10 keywords in the meta tags per page. Most small businesses try and think of anything their customers might be searching for and whack it in the meta tag. Search engines see this and think you are not focused enough. They are trying to find the most relevant page for the search query. The more you have the less relevant they figure you must be to any one search term.

Related to this is putting in nearby suburbs as keyword tags. Unless you mention the suburb throughout your page Google think you are trying to “keyword stuff”, they don’t like that!

4. Cookie or Session-Variable Requirements

Big sites that don’t build content access systems for spiders are asking for trouble – if even a spider has to have a cookie drop to pass through, someone else will be getting your traffic.

5. Content Distribution & Partnerships

Along with cannonical issues on their own sites, many large owners of web content license it out to dozens (sometimes hundreds) of sources. The only thing more damaging than having six versions of content on your site is having six versions of it on six other big, powerful sites.

6. Doing SEO after the website is designed and built

Of course SEO is an ongoing process and fixing these 6 SEO mistakes wont change your ranking overnight, but the great thing is that every little bit can help. Remember its all about what is relevant.

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