Common SEO Mistakes

Getting good results in the search engines can be tricky business. However, many people make common mistakes that hinder an otherwise good campaign. By sticking to and following some basic principals, you should be able to see your rankings improve. There is obviously a lot more to it than this, but below we have laid out three common mistakes that people make, and with each one comes an explanation of how to try and fix the errors.

For the purpose of this article, we are using a fictional website called dogwalking.com, trying to target the pages for keywords such as ‘dog walkers’ etc.

Bad Meta Data
Getting the meta data right is one of the first things you should focus on when optimising a website. The titles, descriptions, and tags should all be clear and concise and inclusive of you main keywords. Many new webmaster simply aren’t aware of this, and the most common mistake is to just use the website title, or page title with no thought to what keywords should be used.



The picture above shows the common mistake of simply repeating the website title as a meta title. This adds no focus to each page and leaves the search engines confused as to what the page is talking about. Duplicate titles are also bad for the very same reason. This can easily be resolved by using keywords within the titles, and making sure nothing is repeated. See the picture below for a good example:



Broken Links
Links throughout the site act as the passageway in which the search engine’s spiders crawl your website. Therefore it is crucial that there are no broken links that could negatively affect this process. Having broken links will basically mean that the spiders hit ‘dead ends’, and if this happens too often then they just won’t be able to get to the information you need them to.



Always ensure that your website is tidy, and that your sitemaps are up to date. If content is changed or replaced, or new pages added, make sure these are linked to correctly and that there are no dead links pointing at the old content.

Wrong Anchor Text
Anchor text is extremely important in telling the search engines how much authority your website has and in what area this should be counted for. The text that displays a link will give reference to what the linked to website is about. If the link is coming from an authoritative website, then it’s crucial that the search engines are instructed clearly via the use of anchor text. This can have a really strong effect on rankings, and below are two examples to illustrate the point:



Bad anchor text example



Good anchor text example