3 Common SEO Mistakes

Ranking your web pages on search engines are usually the foundation to any digital marketing strategy. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to properly execute a solid SEO plan. This article is meant to provide you a quick and easy list that addresses the top 3 SEO mistakes and how to fix them.

SEO Mistake #1: Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the most seen problems with a website’s SEO. Webpages are considered duplicate if they contain identical or nearly identical content. Excessive duplicate content may confuse search engines as to which page to index and which one to prioritize in search results. Using duplicated content across multiple pages may lead to traffic loss and poor placement in search results, and it may even provoke search engines to ban your page. Keep in mind, duplicate content can obviously be due to writing the same content on various pages, but it can also result from duplicate pages or internal issues.

How to fix duplicate content:

  1. Provide unique content on the webpage.
  2. Remove duplicate content.
  3. Add a rel=”canonical” link to one of your duplicate pages to inform search engines which page to show in search results.

SEO Mistake #2: Duplicate and missing meta-descriptions

A meta-description tag is a short summary of a webpage’s content that helps search engines understand what the page is about and can be shown to users in search results. Duplicate meta descriptions on different pages mean a lost opportunity to use more relevant keywords. Also, duplicate meta descriptions make it difficult for search engines and users to differentiate between different web pages. It is better to have no meta description at all than to have a duplicate one.

How to fix duplicate and missing meta-descriptions:

  1. Remove duplicate meta-descriptions and provide a unique description of the page
  2. Provide a unique, relevant meta description for each of your webpages.

SEO Mistake #3: Low text-HTML ratio

Your text to HTML ratio indicates the amount of actual text you have on your webpage compared to the amount of code. This warning is triggered when your text to HTML is 10% or less. Search engines have begun focusing on pages that contain more content. That’s why a higher text to HTML ratio means your page has a better chance of getting a good position in search results. Less code increases your page’s load speed and also helps your rankings. It also helps search engine robots crawl your website faster.

How to fix low text-html ratio:

Split your web page’s text content and code into separate files and compare their size. If the size of your code file exceeds the size of the text file, review your page’s HTML code and consider optimizing its structure and removing embedded scripts and styles.

In Conclusion

There are a significant number of other issues that can arise when optimizing your site for search engines, but begin addressing the one’s mentioned above and you’ll notice a difference. Just remember to take your SEO fixes one step at a time. Patience will go a long way when it comes to SEO.

A picture can really speak volumes in the digital world.

You grab your laptop, tablet, or phone and decide to get online. No matter what website you land on, they will all have (the good ones that is) something in common; relevant and high quality photos. You probably have some basic marketing knowledge and have heard of inbound marketing, content creation, SEO, and the works, but that doesn’t mean much unless you also have relevant photos.  People are visual in nature and without visuals, people tend to lose interest.

Let’s say you’re a 5 star restaurant and you have a decent online presence. You have a website, some positive reviews online, and participate in social media, but your analytics is showing you have a high bounce rate on your website and there’s no increase of traffic to your restaurant. That’s obviously a problem and one of the reasons may be a lack of appealing photos. I’m sure most of you have gone to a restaurant’s website for their menu and wanted to see how good their food looks. This is a pivotal moment in capturing your customer’s business. It’s like when you’re at a restaurant and see someone’s food coming out and you say to yourself “wow, I should have ordered that. That looks amazing.” That’s the same type of feeling you want people to have when seeing your pictures. Whether you’re in the restaurant industry, retail, real estate, manufacturing or aerospace, photos can be used to draw people in.

Images and SEO

SEO must always be managed and adjusted due to Google’s algorithm changes, but one part of SEO that will always remain important is high-quality images. Images are important because more and more people are using search engines’ image-search tool. This means the relevance and quality of your images play a factor in how you rank in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If your website contains high-image quality photos with the appropriate alt-texts and keywords, your image search alone can pull in a significant number of people to your website.

Better Images Means Better User Engagement

High quality images are shown to drastically improve readability. Here are some compelling statistics from Steamfeed:

  • Articles featuring images get 94% more total views than those without images
  • Photos and videos in press releases are shown to increase views by 45%
  • Over half of customers are inclined to contact businesses which display an image when their content comes up in search results
  • 67% of consumers think that the quality of an image depicting a product plays an important role for them when following through with a purchase
  • 37% more engagement on Facebook occurs with posts with photos than posts without

There are many reasons why photos are an important part of any website. Photos are important for SEO, engaging with your customers, and providing the image you want for your business. Websites or even social platforms that contain high quality images can bring in more users and engagement. Not to mention more sales for your business.These aren’t the days of polaroids, but we are living in a time where digital photos can truly be worth a thousand words.