SEO Basics for Your Website - What You Could Be Overlooking

Hav­ing a solid foun­da­tion is the key for any inter­net mar­ket­ing project. With­out hav­ing your web­site up to scratch you’re putting your­self at a dis­ad­van­tage from the go.

From Good To Great

Unfor­tu­nately not many web­sites are up to scratch with the require­ments that take a web­site from good to great in the eyes of the search engines. Here are just a few of the things that you and your web designer should imple­ment to give you the best chance of achiev­ing your goals.

Title Tags

This is one the key ele­ments of your pages and yet it is over­looked so many times. Each of your pages should have its own unique title that includes the key­word that you’re try­ing to tar­get.

It also has to be fewer than 70 char­ac­ters in length, includ­ing the spaces. If your title is too long then it will be cut short when dis­played in the search engine results page.

You have to avoid stuff­ing the title with key­words as well. Make it sound nat­ural and help­ful for some­body try­ing to fig­ure out exactly what your page is about.

Meta Descrip­tions

Just like the title tag, the Meta Descrip­tion tag is also a key ele­ment on your page. It sells what your page does when the user sees your web­site in the search engines and encour­ages them to click through to your web­site.

It too must be unique for every page and be fewer than 150 char­ac­ters includ­ing spaces. Any longer and it runs the risk of being cut short in the results page.

Dupli­cate Con­tent

Dupli­cate con­tent is one of the biggest issues that web­sites face. With­out know­ing, your web­site could be dis­play­ing the same con­tent across mul­ti­ple URLs.

Let’s take an ecom­merce web­site for exam­ple. You may be sell­ing a chair that appears in mul­ti­ple cat­e­gories. The same infor­ma­tion for this chair may appear on a num­ber of dif­fer­ent URLs such as:

• www.website.com/my-awesome-chair.html
• www.website.com/chairs/my-awesome-chair.html
• www.website.com/furniture/my-awesome-chair.html
• www.website.com/special-offers/my-awesome-chair.html

We can see very clearly that the num­ber of addresses and sub­se­quently the num­ber of dupli­cate pages that can add up. Throw in pag­i­na­tion, fil­ter­ing, etc, and the num­bers can be mas­sive.

Canon­i­cal Issues

Once again, we come back to the issue of dupli­cate con­tent; one other way to dou­ble up your page count and split your hard earned link juice is to not con­sol­i­date your sites addresses. For exam­ple:

• www.website.com
• www.website.com/
• http://www.website.com
• http://website.com

To the search engines, your web­site appears on at least 4 dif­fer­ent URLs. It is rec­om­mended that you use a rewrite rule and con­sol­i­date the addresses to a sin­gle for­mat. Ide­ally:

http://www.website.com/

If you redi­rect all the requests to that for­mat using a 301 redi­rect then you pass all the link juice to a sin­gle address mak­ing the page much stronger in the eyes of the search engines.

There is much debate if hav­ing this frac­tured URL addresses can have a neg­a­tive impact on rank­ing how­ever it is good prac­tice both from an SEO and usabil­ity per­spec­tive to merge them.

Clos­ing Words

So there you have it, if you have these com­mon issues cor­rected then you put your­self in a strong posi­tion to get the traf­fic and rank­ings your web­site deservers. If you have any other basic tips, ques­tions and com­ments then please let us know in the com­ments below!