Give any SEO sales person the chance and he or she he will find dozens (if not hundreds) of issues with your existing website. Quite frankly many of the issues are minor and may not even affect your sites rankings. For example not having you’re your images with alt tags, or the title tag having a few too many characters are common issues but you won’t improve your rankings if they are fixed.
The following are common mistakes that really make a difference in your rankings, or visitor traffic.
Poor Home Page Content: What is the most critical content to put on your home page? “What you do”, “who you do it for” and “why should someone do business with you”. Those questions should be answered in 125 words or less. More often than not I see the mission statement, or the latest trade show info leading the content. Those items are fine, but your visitor did not come to your site to find out when you are attending a trade show or read your mission statement. They want to know if you can provide a solution to their needs.
What’s even worse than a mission statement on your home page? No readable content, a 100% flash home page…yuck! About 90 % of the sites I review flunk the home page test.
Poor Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: The title tag is extremely important from a search engine standpoint. Each page should have a title tag that succinctly describes the content of that page. Each page should have a unique meta description that is compelling. Most sites that I review don’t do one or both of these very well. Not having them done well can hurt your traffic.
Never Changing Content: Some dead give-away that your site is not being updated regularly: The copyright at the bottom of the page reads 2006. The latest news item on your news page is 4 years old. Not changing content is a sure way to keep your site from ranking well. Search engines don’t like stale content. Many of the sites that I review were fresh when they were first launched and have not changed since. Not every page has to change, but you need to figure out ways to keep refreshing your content on a regular basis.
Lack of Inbound Links: It is very difficult to get ranking on competitive search terms without a variety of inbound quality links. Many of the sites I see may only have a dozen or so. Often, you don’t need to get hundreds or thousands of links to make a difference; you just need a few quality links from some authoritative sites. It a lot easier said than done, but you will be a lot better off spending your time getting a few good links rather than paying some link building company 1000’s of dollars to get worthless links.
If your site does well on these four items, then you should be on your way to getting some good traffic.
