Guest Post: SEO Mistakes People Still Keep Making

Search engine optimization has become more well known in recent years and a lot of people are seeking out either SEO companies to do the work or reading up on forums for advice on how to get their sites to rank higher. However from both professional SEO companies and more amateur SEO jobs I still see the same mistakes being made over and over again and they are all easy to fix with a couple of spare hours and a quick Google search.

• The first mistake I keep seeing being made is that http:// and http://www. both work as separate sites. What you need to do is put a 301 redirect in place so that one redirects to the other. This is still partly Google fault because they can treat both versions as different sites and if you have links pointing to both linking structures Google won't automatically assume they are the same page and you are wasting link juice. This change is just a simple copy and paste job that you put in your .htaccess file and change site.com for your site address.

• I still see people not using title tags properly. They either say "home" or "home.html" or nothing or don't contain the details about the page or every page on the site has the same title tag. In most cases cms's make it easy to give each page a unique title and if you have a static site take the extra time to fix each page and make the title tag unique. This is one of the big pointers to Google to let them know what your site is about.

• While Google doesn't use all the Meta tags information such as keywords they do use the description tag. Take the time to fill it in with a nice snippet of information. Google will look at this to work out what your page is about and the text usually appears in search results under the title of the page or site.

• Google is getting better at reading images but it's not perfect and people with sight issues still can't see them. Use the alt tags to let people know what the images are in case they don't load or they are browsing in text. Just make sure you don't keyword stuff the alt tag. Another image related issue people keep forgetting is that they don't use the width and height tags for images. This lets Google know how big the image is and will load the site properly around that space.

• The last thing people always forget is that they don't promote their posts and updates. Tweet or Facebook about them, submit them to people, ping them. Let people and Google know there is content on your site and they should come and index it or read it.

These are all small fixes you can put in place that will give a vast improvement to how your site performs. Just remember to put the extra effort in to give your site the best possible chance.