Top 7 SEO Mistakes
It’s getting ever more difficult to get new websites ranking and older websites keeping their good positions within Google search. We have seen up to SEVEN spots for Google adwords taking up space, and now the ‘seven pack’ local listings are a mere three; hundreds of dental practices in some cases are all competing for a space in the top ten organic listings.
So what can we do to compete against the odds? Well it may surprise you to learn that some websites are still struggling with basic SEO techniques. These are the technical, on-page habits that are easily addressable, but can make a huge difference to your overall search ranking.
This is what we check for when taking on a new seo client:
- Duplicate content
According to SEMrush, 50% of analysed web pages face duplicate content issues.
Although there isn’t a specific penalty against duplicate content, the problem arises when your similar webpages begin cannibalising each other for the same search positions and Google ends up filtering one at the expense of another
How do you combat this? Write your own content! No one can explain your treatments better than you as you have years of experience. However if this sounds daunting, why not use our copywriter to write bespoke content for your website- which search engines love.
- Missing alt tags and broken images
Research reveals that 45% of sites have images with missing alt tags and another 10% have broken images.
Alt tags are a way to accurately describe your images to search engines to make sure they’re indexed properly in image search, and therefore bring some extra traffic to your site.
- Title tag issues
Title tags are used to tell search engines and visitors what any given page on your site is about in the most concise and accurate way possible.
It has been found that 35% of sites have duplicate title tags, 15% have too much text in the tag, 8% are missing them and 4% don’t provide enough text.
- Meta descriptions
The meta description is the short paragraph of text placed in the HTML of a webpage that describes its content. The meta description appears under your page’s URL in the search results.
Research shows that 30% of sites have duplicate meta descriptions and 25% of sites have no meta descriptions at all.
- Broken internal and external links
The research showed that 35% of sites had broken internal links
A further 25% of sites had broken external links, which can impair your website’s authority.
- Insufficient Copy
It’s important that every page has lots of text for Google to crawl and to improve your audience’s experience, so ensure there is atleast 250 words of copy on all of your pages.
- Too many on-page links
The research reveals that 15% of sites have too many on-page links on some pages.
Having a number of links on a page isn’t a problem as such, but cramming a page with unnatural links definitely is.
Carry out a link audit for every page and get rid of the links that don’t provide any value to your readers or your SEO strategy.
If you would like us to take a look at your website against these markers to see if we can improve your search engine rankings- give Dental Design a call and we’ll be happy to help you.
Thanks to search engine watch for the inspiration for this post
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