Even with excellent content and attractive websites, most companies fail to attract the expected amount of web traffic because of basic SEO mistakes that they commit. In this video, Matt Cutts – Head of the Google Webspam team lists the top SEO mistakes that he sees frequently. According to him, contrary to popular belief these SEO mistakes are not advanced coding errors but simple stuff that companies miss out or ignore.
Un-crawlable websites
This is the most common mistake that Matt sees on the web. Companies will launch and maintain a website but place content in such a way that search engine bots are unable to reach it. Matt says that webmasters should make sure that all their webpages are linked to each other and are easily accessible just by clicking on regular links. Webpages and content should not be hidden or unreachable as this could only hurt the search rankings. Apart from this, Matt also says that many companies don’t maintain websites or have a domain. Shockingly, in this digital age, there are quite a few companies that still don’t have websites for customers and this is probably the biggest mistake that any company can make.
Matt uses the example of restaurants and points out that they should have their menus – preferably in text format – on their websites. PDF files and images are not crawlable and restaurants should refrain from using these formats to display menus, working hours, company description, etc.
Wrong keywords
Webmasters and content marketers are obsessed with keyword insertion and attaining the right keyword density on a webpage. However, they make the mistake of using wrong keywords on the page. As Matt says, webmasters should think of what people are going to type in the search bar when deciding what words to use on a page. For example, instead of using “Mount Everest elevation” as a keyphrase, content creators and webmasters should include the phrase “how high in Mount Everest” in their content as users are far more likely to type the latter phrase in the search bar.
Obsessing on link building
Matt also says that webmasters and content marketers should focus their energies on creating compelling and valuable content instead of link building activities. According to him, once people stop obsessing about link building, a variety or marketing avenues open up to them. Print media, newspapers, billboard advertisements, guerilla marketing, etc. are all excellent and creative ways to promote a brand and its website.
Missing titles and descriptions
Meta titles and descriptions are extremely important for any webpage. The meta title and the meta description appear on search results and decide if the user is going to click on the webpage link or not. Webmasters need to think about what the title will look like on Google search results and when users bookmark the webpage. It is a known fact that users almost never click on untitled pages and they will probably never find a bookmarked page if it is untitled.
Not using free webmaster tools
Google offers lots of webmaster tools to webmasters for free but many webmasters ignore them. Matt points out that using these webmaster tools can help companies improve their websites and find design and content errors. They can also monitor traffic, conversions, etc. with the help of webmaster tools. To ensure that webmasters know how to use these tools properly, Google maintains a blog, YouTube channel and social media pages and hosts conferences.
Watch this video to learn more about these SEO mistakes and how webmasters can rectify these errors.