How To Improve Your Website: 3 SEO Mistakes Companies Make With Their Website
Recently, a prospective 360Partners client made this observation about their website, “5 years ago, I was getting thousands and thousands of visits from natural (or unpaid) search. Over the past year and a half, my traffic has decreased by 75%. I haven’t done anything to my website. Why am I not getting as many visits?” This business owner is not alone in wanting more natural search traffic and many business owners are seeking ways to improve and grow search volume to their website.
360Partners offers prospective clients a free SEO Site Review The site review includes a detailed SEO list of best practices that can have a big impact on a site’s ability to bring in relevant natural search traffic. Over the course of performing many of these reviews, 360Partners has identified a pattern in some of the common mistakes made by many websites.
In this month’s newsletter, we‘ll go over three of the most common SEO issues we encounter and we’ll discuss why they can be problematic and how you can avoid them.
1. Duplicate Content:
Search engines make every effort to keep their search results from being cluttered by extremely similar content. It makes sense. When you run a search on, say “car insurance” do you want to see the exact same content multiple times? Exactly how similar does content have to be to be considered as duplicate content? No one knows for sure… so it’s wise to err on the side of caution. In general, think twice if considering posting anything more than a short paragraph or so of the same text on multiple pages.
Why it’s a problem:
1. Pages not ranking. Once a search engine identifies duplicate content, it will make every effort to determine which version of that content is the authoritative page and the other pages may be relegated to the supplemental index (A certain death for rankings). Factors such as when and where the content was first indexed and trust level of the domain will likely impact which page is considered to be the original.
2. Penalties. Excessive use of duplicate content on your site could result in search engine penalties which is a straight path to low rankings.
How to avoid it:
1. Don’t try to save time by copying content from other sites verbatim or reposting your own content in the hopes of ranking multiple pages. Original content is critical to good SEO.
2. If you have unavoidable duplicate content on pages that are under your control, employ the use of the “link rel=canonical” tag in your pages. This tag will allow you to specify the preferred page URL and is recommended by Google as a way of addressing the problem.
2. URL Canonicalization:
“Canonicalization” refers to web content that can be addressed by more than one URL. In this case, it isn’t that there are actually duplicate pages of content, but that a single page of content can be reached by typing in multiple URLs in the browser.
Why it’s a problem
1. Indexing. Any time you have a page that is addressable by multiple URLs, you have the potential for that page to be indexed under both URLs. With two URLs in the search index for the exact same content, a less desirable URL structure may be the one that is actually presented in the search results
2. Site rank. It’s fairly common for people to link to your site using slight variations of the page URL. For example, some may link to the home page as “www.homepage.com/html” while others just link to it as "www.homepage.com/.” If both of these URLs resolve individually, then there is a good chance that the inbound links are being treated by the search engine as if they were directing to 2 separate pages instead of 1 page. As a result, your site will rank lower.
How to avoid it
The standard fix for any canonicalization issue is to utilize a server based technology to redirect the URL to the proper page. In tech-speak this is known as employing a HTTP 301 redirect for the duplicate URL. On Linux based server platforms, the Apache Mod Rewrite module provides this functionality. On Windows based platforms, it is usually achieved via IIS.
When the duplicate URL is requested by a browser, the request is automatically redirected by the web server to your preferred URL for the content. When done properly, HTTP 301 redirects seamlessly send the visitor to the preferred page and also send a clear signal to the search engines that this is the page they should associate with the indexed content.
Some of the more popular PHP based Content Management Systems may also have plug-ins available designed to address canonicalization. Implementing these for your CMS may save you a lot of time setting up manual redirects on the server.
3. Lack of Unique Title and Description Tags:
SEO pros have long correlated keyword rich html title tags as an important ranking factor. In fact, the title tag is one of the most important on-page optimization elements.
The Meta description tag is not correlated as a ranking factor, but is still just as important since it is the description text that will be shown in the search result just below the page title. This is the primary text that will impact whether or not a searcher decides to click through to your page.
These tags are comparable to the ad text you would carefully craft for a paid search listing.
Why it’s a problem:
1. Users see the wrong message. By not specifying either of these tags at all, you are leaving it up to the search engine to determine what text to display in the corresponding area of the search result. This is likely not optimal for clicks or conversions.
2. Poorly optimized. If your site has a lot of duplicate tags, it means that some of your pages are probably poorly optimized for relevant search terms.
How to avoid it:
Title Tag:
* Make sure to put a title tag in each page’s code and be sure to craft a unique string of text that is relevant and keyword rich.
* This tag is placed in the head of the source document and appears as follows:
<title>Title of the document</title>
* Limit your title tag text to around 65 characters (including spaces) to avoid having the text chopped off in the results listings.
Meta Description Tag:
* Put a meta description tag in each page’s source code and craft a unique string of keyword rich text to be displayed.
* This tag is placed in the head of the source document and appears as follows:
<meta name="Description" content="unique-text-here" />
* Limit your meta description text to around 150 characters (including spaces) to avoid having the text chopped off in the results listings.
Conclusion:
There are many best practices to consider if you want your site to perform well in natural search, and we’ve named a few here. Some of these are technically simple such as inserting a title tag, and yet it can be difficult crafting the actual text. Other issues can be more technically challenging such as setting up 301 redirects. However, taking the time to do things properly can result in higher search rankings, more traffic to your website and, ultimately, more customers.
360Partners employs SEO best practices and processes for our clients. If you would like to learn more, email us at seo@360Partners.com
About the author: Brian Milton leads an SEO team at 360Partners. He and his team work on a variety of SEO related projects.
