As a professional SEO I see many websites that have made mistakes with their search engine optimisation, some of them simple mistakes, some of them complicated mistakes and some of them extremely costly mistakes.
This week (bearing in mind it’s only Tuesday) I have already looked at several websites that have made some classic SEO mistakes. Here are just a few of them:
Duplicate Page Titles
This is as basic as walking, yet still many websites feature their company name in the Title Tag, and only the company name, on every single page of their website. This means that the most powerful SEO element on the pages of their website is ignored and rendered useless. Plus by making it duplicate they’re turning its power against their own website.
Keep the Title tags different on every page!
Keyword Stuffed Meta Tags
This is another classic mistake. If you must use Meta tags (and it’s not really worth spending any time over it) don’t stuff them with keywords so they become huge lists of spam text that mark your website out as one heading for a banning. Adding hundreds of keywords to your website’s Description and Keywords tags is not only spam, it’s also pointless.
Keyword Lists
This is one trick that many SEOs still use today, yet isn’t likely to win you any favours with the big G. Knowing that keywords are important for SEO, some webmasters put lists of keywords on their website, maybe disguising it as navigation or perhaps placing it in the footer, all containing links to parts of the website. While this isn’t a complete no no in SEO, there are much better ways of doing this.
Keywords linking to pages are important, but they should be used on the website’s pages in context, in paragraphs and well formatted relevant text. Lists of keywords add nothing to your website, as an SEO trick it’s well past its best.
These are just three classic mistakes that I have come across this week and I’m sure there’ll be more to come in the days ahead.
- What are the nuts and bolts of digital marketing? - September 10, 2020
- What is Google RankBrain and how do you use it? - September 9, 2020
- Three dos (and three don’ts) of writing great content - September 4, 2020
I would say Keyword Stuffed Meta Tags is the top of my list this week.
Although Google don’t ace about this, Yahoo still see it, but will ignore them if it’s too many keywords.