3 Simple SEO Fixes
This week I take a look at a mate’s site. Sean Callanan of SportsGeek. There are some common SEO issues that I’m seeing in Sean’s site that I see on a lot of sites and in our experience when you fix these things you get a good bump in rankings.
1. Check your sitemap entry in Google Webmaster tools. In the case of sportsgeekhq.com the sitemap was submitted in June 2013 but was last processed 6 months ago. If you’re publishing all the time like Sean is, that is bad. You want Google to process the sitemap as soon as you publish something new. The reason that Google has not reprocessed the sitemap is that it has a 404 error in it.
We’ve seen lots of sites get good bumps as soon as we fix this.
2. Make Your Page Titles very specific. Sean’s Home Page title is “Sports Geek – Sports Digital Marketing & Social Media Marketing” . We don’t need the brand in in the page title. That is just taking up valuable real estate. A lot of businesses have it in every page of their website . If you must do that make it the last phrase not the first one. There are actually two distinct phrases bundled into one as well in the page title. You need to be very clear and specific about what you want to rank for.
3. I’ve seen numerous videos where Google tells you not to worry too much about 404 errors. What they don’t tell you though is that if Google finds those 404 errors from inside your site it will negatively affect your ranking. I’ve seen sites plummet in the rankings overnight because they have developed a bunch of 404s. Think about it. If a page was there one day but isn’t the next, it must affect the other pages it was linking to as well as the overall experience for the user if they are clicking on broken links. The higher the percentage of pages they represent of the entire site, the worse the impact will be on rankings.
The higher you get for a competitive phrase the more elements come into play. It’s like watching olympic diving, the smallest error can cost you big time at that level.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
