Five SEO Mistakes to Avoid on your Website

Below I have listed five things that are often done while developing or working on a website that prove to be a major set-back to SEO efforts. You would think that these would be mostly be done by website owners who don't know better, but in my experience these are usually done by so called professionals taking advantage of people who don't know better.

1: Adding the File Extension When Linking Back

It is a common misconception that if you want to link to the homepage using relative linking, that you must use the file name i.e ../index.php. I have seen this done dozens of times by so called professional web developers and SEOs who should know better. It causes the search engines to index both: http://www.mysite.com and http;//www.mysite.com/index.php.

If I want to link to the homepage of this site from /seo-services/seo-scotland.php all I need to use is <a href="../">homepage</a>. I have also seen it done (though less often) to link to directories, people using ../booking/index.htm when ../booking/ would have done. Note: ../ simply moves out of the directory and one level up the document tree.

2: Not Using Keywords/Phrases in the Page Title

Arguably -- no argument about it as far as I'm concerned -- the page title is the single most important element for SEO on the entire page. It makes me really angry when I see so called experts not using any keywords or phrases in the page title.

3: Not using Meta Descriptions or poorly written ones

I used to advocate the use of the meta keywords tag as well but now Google has officially admitted that it doesn't use the keyword tag. None the less, the meta description is still one of the first things that the search engines look at. What's more, despite the fact that the search engines now display the most relevant text from anywhere on the page as the summary in the results, if you do things properly you can make sure your meta description is the summary in the search results of the key phrases and words you are targeting. This gives you a chance to get in with a call to action.

Needless to say I hate it when I see websites built by so called professionals that have no meta descriptions, poorly written descriptions, or the same description for every page. I worked on one site where the developer had put a single meta description in a php file and used a includes to insert it into every page of the site. This was done so that the website owners could easily change the meta.

4: Not using heading tags

Using heading tags h1 through h6 to identify the headings on the page, and to further let the search engines know what the content on the page is about -- on top of the page title and meta description -- is of massive benefit to your position in the search engine results.

While it is better to use all h tags h1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, using as many as you can is better than using none at all, and if all else fails if you can at least use h1 and h2, these will make a difference to your SEO results on their own. I have seen far too many sites using no h tags at all, again websites that were developed by so called professionals.

Note: I mean on web pages, which are written with the aim of getting good positions in the search engines for a particular key phrase, not articles. On those pages you should break it into sub-headings using keyphrase variants, all of which will be in a different h tag.

5: Using WYSIWIG (What you See is what You Get) editors and/or Tables

WYSIWIG allows you to design and develop a webpage using an MS-Paint style interface, drawing elements and dragging them around the page. The editor then turns this into html for uploading to the site. However, these editors create bulky and untidy code, with loads of inline styles, which can lead to one of the main keywords your site is indexed for being span style="font-size:2" and similar things.

Tables can have the same result and both increase the load time of a web page considerably which will slowdown the speed at which new pages on your site are indexed.

The professionals are guilty of using tables. Whereas WYSIWIGs are often used by novices; website owners who can't afford or don't want to shell out for a professional web design and development. While WYSIWIG's do allow people who don't know (X)html and css to put a website online, they do future SEO efforts no favours at all.

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