Weekend Project: Correct Content Mistakes That Are Damaging Your SEO

For people who build their Website Or Blog, SEO is one of the most overlooked areas of Website Development but when we first start building our site, because we are so eager to get online and live for all to see we probably do not pay as much attention to SEO and all the small associated issues as we should, At this point it’s best to keep things organized and try to not commit basic SEO mistakes, Believe me It will cut down on your work load later. Some examples of bad SEO mistakes would include.

• Website Title. This must be relevant to your sites content

• Website Description Must be included and again it must be relevant, this will allow Google to find your site

• Use Keyword Meta Tags, some search engines still use them but don’t overdo it

• Unsure if your sites keywords and keyword phrases are relevant to your sites content

• Broken links will destroy your SEO.A website with broken links any link is very unprofessional: Google expects websites to be technically perfect. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to have broken links within a website.

• Websites that have image only content are extremely difficult to rank.

• Navigation issues and menu layout. Bad for SEO and makes for a bad visitor experience

• W3C is an organization that sets website standards. Do you know if your website passes W3C validation?

• Author Resource Box, Missing Links, Broken Links, Bad Phrasing and Incorrect Spelling.

This is how I follow up my SEO efforts every 3 months or so.I am by no means an SEO professional but I do very well by following established, proven and legitimate SEO practices, these techniques are not complicated and with a little time and thought you will surprised how much your weekend project really paid off.
I like to use Google Analytic’s it a great tool for web statics and can tell you how visitors interact with your site. Now to roll up our sleeves and get started. I check content first, So open “All Post’s “I start at the first article or post and work my way down, I then check keywords first make sure they are still relevant and getting search results, you can use Google Adwords keyword tool for this. Next check for spelling and grammatical errors this is very important to Google and will harm your ranking it also makes your site look very unprofessional, to me that say’s (“I can’t manage or I am not interested in my website or customers”).The correct and proper use of Heading tags is very significant for your website SEO, this is very common and often committed mistake and should be avoided. Use H1, h2 and h3 In their correct place and context.

Backlinks: are very important SEO factors. Have you checked how many other websites link to your website? I guarantee Google knows. The more Backlinks to your website, the better for your SEO. Also, the quality and source of the Backlinks is important to Google. By that I mean content rich sites that are again relevant to your own. Oh and a word of caution here do not try to use unethical SEO and get heaps of Backlinks quickly thinking this will help your SEO, It won’t you will simply trigger the search engines spam alert, and you will be heavily penalized by Google. I won’t say who but about ten years ago a very large European luxury car manufacturer was taken of Google search ranking for 9 months, Google took this action because they apparently used Keywords that were not at all relevant to motor vehicles, and this had the effect of artificially boosting their ranking. Thus they were heavily penalized by Google. They were not visible in Google search for 9 months.

Use of Wordpress and the All in One SEO Pack in my opinion is very least you should use. The All in One SEO Pack comes standard with Wordpress, you can also upgrade to the professional version very easily.

If you haven’t do so yet create an Author Recourse Box That links back to your site or affiliate links I can’t find an adjective to describe just how important this is for your site and SEO. Remember to include your Author Resource Box in your articles and any forum signatures, Posts or advertising you create etc.

Breadcrumb navigation ever heard of it.It’s a form of website navigation that is very important to your SEO simply because if visitors cannot find what they want quickly and easily they hit the back button. Make sure all your sites internal links are working correctly; Breadcrumbs leave a trail for uses to follow usually arranged horizontally across the top of WebPages and called for example contact, About US, or any page title. They provide links to your pages and the previous page the user visited. Home page > Section page > Subsection page. Your visitors must always be able to get back to your home page in one click so there must be link back to your homepage on every page. If you just pick any site online you find most sites today use breadcrumb navigation, it’s so intuitive we don’t even realize we are using it until we come across a site with truly terrible site navigation.

This is easily achievable over a weekend you will be glad you took the extra time. Once you have made all changes and cleaned thing’s up a bit, Sit back and watch the new traffic come in, give it a little while though.

I will be publishing a more comprehensive SEO article with more advanced techniques shortly.

That’s it for Now

By Graham Drew
May 2012