SEO Most Common Problems
Hope you’ve had a good week. It’s been a cold Melbourne summer so far down here. This week I asked on Twitter who wants an SEO review of their site and was inundated with requests. Maybe it was the Free SEO hashtag 🙂
I’ve ended up reviewing four sites for SEO and they all had similar issues.
SEO Issue 1 – slow sites
By using webpagetest.org you can check whether your site’s speed can be improved. In today’s review nearly everyone failed. These are usually fairly simple things to fix. For mosts sites it should only take about 15 minutes to fix. Google does not want to send it’s users to slow sites. If there is a competitor who has a faster site chances are they will get the clicks, not you.
SEO Issue 2 – Duplication
3 out of four sites I reviewed today had duplication issues. This is an issue because if you have the same page appearing four times on your site, which one should Google rank? If you find you are up one day and down the next like an SEO see-saw, quite often it’s because Google is switching the authority between duplicate pages. We find sites improve dramatically once the duplication is cleared up.
SEO Issue 3 – Site Titles
This is a really easy thing to fix as well. Most sites will have their brand early in every page title. That doesn’t really help search engines understand what the page is about. Remember it’s about good document structure. Use your keywords in your titles.
SEO Issue 4 – Bad Crawl
Not only could Google be crawling pages you don’t want it to but you may also have a massive 404 issue. This was true for at least one site I looked at today. I see it happen a lot where sites are discontinuing products or deleting pages without a proper redirection.
These reviews were all done without access to Google Webmaster tools. My guess is that a look at webmaster tools for these sites would reveal a lot more problems and some opportunities as well for the way we do SEO.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
