According to Las Vegas SEO company, the following are the 5 most critical errors your website may be facing and how to correct them.
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Mistake 1: You’re not optimizing your site for the right keywords
A completely avoidable mistake that many SEO newbies make is optimizing a web page for the wrong keywords. It’s very easy to get lost in the vast array of potential keywords for your business, but it’s always best to take the time to define the words with the most real potential. So, avoid:
- overly competitive keywords
- overly generic keywords.
- Overly competitive keywords may work, but much less quickly and much less effectively. Keywords that are too broad may attract a larger audience, but it will also be less targeted and therefore less likely to stay on your site.
Finally, always keep in mind that keywords that you identify as “relevant” may not be used by your target customers.
To analyze your keywords and ensure their potential, we suggest you use tools such as Google Keywords Planner , Moz Keyword Explorer and SEMrush.
Mistake 2: you are doing keyword stuffing
When learning about SEO for the first time, it can become tempting to stuff your web pages with keywords in order to propel your page to the top of search results faster. However, focusing on the quantity of keywords at the expense of the quality of the content is a very risky practice. Take this example:
“We sell ice cream. Our ice cream is the best ice cream of any ice cream in the neighborhood. Come quickly taste our ice cream! ”
Phew. Not very pretty, is it? Overuse keywords is like creating repetitive content that is very unappealing to your readership, which is ultimately counterproductive if you’re looking to convert them into repeat visitors or even customers. So make sure you find the perfect balance between writing for humans and optimizing for robots.
Error 3: Your site contains duplicate content
We mentioned duplicate URLs, but what about duplicate content? Are your product descriptions original or a simple copy and paste of the manufacturer’s descriptions? Is your blog just an assortment of content found all over the web and reposted by you?
Several websites, and more frequently e-commerce, recycle the same content on more than one page, or obtain their content elsewhere on the web. Although this practice is not directly sanctioned, it confuses search engines and makes indexing your website more difficult. So make sure to:
- Put forward as much unique content as possible
- Create original meta tags for each page
- Limit generic product descriptions as much as possible.
You can use the free Siteliner tool to identify the proportion of your site that has duplicate content.
Finally, you can also read our SEO guide for e-commerce to learn more about the best practices to adopt to improve your SEO when managing an online store.
Error 4: The meta titles and meta descriptions of your pages are not optimized
Meta-titles and meta-descriptions are tags that help Google users see at a glance what your web page is about. This is the information presented on the results page and therefore potentially the first impression one has of your site.
It is crucial to write eye-catching meta-titles and meta-descriptions that are concise, clear and above all relevant. Three mistakes are to be avoided:
1- Avoid exceeding 150 to 170 characters, including spaces. If your meta description is too long, it might get cut off, like in the image above.
2- Do not systematically reuse the same meta-titles and meta-descriptions for several different pages: take the time to create original meta tags for each page.
3- Do not overuse the keywords in your meta-tags: you would not want to pass for a spammer
We discuss this subject in more depth in our web writing guide, in which you will also find all the crucial content creation steps to improve SEO.
Error 5: Your images are not optimized
Besides the size and heaviness of the images that can potentially hurt your SEO, a common SEO mistake is not optimizing your images. As with the rest of your content, you can communicate the relevance of your images to Google using what is called “alt-text”.
Indeed, the code of any image on your site gives Google two crucial pieces of information so that it can better index it: the name of the image and a description of what it shows. The latter is described in the alt text, which you can easily change.
