When it comes to your website you want it to be performing efficiently and ranking well, right?
SEO plays a big role in how well your website is ranking, so it’s important to focus your attention on SEO early on. If you’re just starting out and unsure what SEO really means, then take a read of our article; Is SEO Still Worth It. We discuss at some length about SEO, and it’s importance.
However, occasionally we can find ourselves stumbling over the basics trying to get it right. So that’s why we have compiled a list of the top 5 basic SEO mistakes that could be holding your website back.
The Top 5 SEO Basics:
- Not Fixing Broken Pages With Backlinks
If you have a website with numerous web pages, it can be easy to lose sight of when a pages URL needs to be updated. 404 errors occur when a URL has broken or been changed. Whether they are internal links between pages or links to other websites, if they are left broken, they can seriously affect your overall SEO. Broken pages containing backlinks are vitally important to correct.
- Missing Page META Descriptions
A META description or otherwise referred to as META tags is an HTML element which summarises the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines. These snippets are often seen below the title of your page. A well written and compelling META description has the power to influence the click-through rate of your organic search results heavily.
- Not Building Your Site For Mobile
Is your website mobile friendly?
It probably comes to no surprise that over 50% of the global searches come directly from mobile devices. Not only is 50% of the search volume coming from mobile devices, but Google also crawls mobile websites to determine how well they rank.
- Heavy & Large Image Files
Visual content is great for users, but are your images affecting your SEO?
Google officially takes into consideration the speed of your website as a crucial ranking factor, with bonus points given to websites that load quickly across multiple devices. Before uploading any imagery to blog articles or product pages, ensure that they are properly compressed to an acceptable size, without sacrificing quality.
- Duplicated Content
When duplicated content is present, website owners rankings and traffic ultimately suffers.
For search engines, duplicated content is incredibly confusing for multiple reasons. Firstly, search engines are unable to distinguish which link they should include or exclude for their indices. Following on from this, search engines are also unable to assess whether the link metrics are trustworthy. These factors make it almost impossible for search engines to determine which version should rank in search results.