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Top Ten SEO Issues

Written by: Scott Hendison

Article Overview: These are what I believe to be the top 10 most important things that you need to get your website found in the search engine results pages. They are not necessarily in any particular order of importance, because the importance can vary from time to time, and search engine to search engine.

Top Ten SEO Issues

1. Title Tag
The title tag is what displays in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as your headline, and it is also what displays across the top blue band in your web browser on someone’s screen.
Each page should ALWAYS have a unique title tag. Sharing a single title tag throughout many web pages is bad. Of course, since it's the first thing people see in the SERPs, your spelling and grammar are critical. Typos in the title tag will prevent people from even clicking on your search result, in many cases.

The title tag of your website should not only be easy to read, but should also be written to bring in traffic. A main keyword phrase for each specific page should be used, and the title should be informative, and not just stuffed with keywords.

While it's true that there are websites being found that do not use a primary search phrase in the title tag, the vast majority, I would estimate 85%; still use the phrase in the title tag. This may change as the web evolves, but is currently accurate for most sites.

Don’t list your company name first, unless you are already a household name like NASCAR or HBO. People are more likely to search for what you have to offer, not your name.

Your title tag should be written with a capital letter starting the tag, and followed by all lowercase letters unless you’re using proper nouns. Some people, (myself included), prefer to capitalize every word. For me, a proper title tag would looks like this:
Important Search Term | Second Term | City & State | Company name

2. Description Meta Tag
The description tag is the paragraph that people will see when your page comes up in the search results, so spelling and grammar are important there as well.

Your description tag should be captivating and designed to attract business. It should sound natural when read aloud, and ideally will compel the reader to act right now and follow your link.
Without a description tag, search engines will frequently display whatever page text surrounds the query word, resulting in nonsense in the SERP's.

A description tag is a description of the page, not of the entire website. Only on the index page of your website, would an all encompassing description tag appropriate. Each other pages description tag should be unique to that particular page.

Just like your title, every page in your site needs a unique description tag for the search engines to be fully appreciative of what you have to offer, and for visitors to be fully appreciative when they see your listing in the SERPS. Think of writing a description tag the way you would write a classified ad.

3. Keywords Meta Tag
The importance of meta keyword tags fluctuates from month to month among different search
engines. There is a debate in the SEO community as to whether or not they help at all on certain search engines. In fact, in the summer of 2004 it appeared as if they were losing importance
altogether.

However, since you'll NEVER be penalized on any search engines for using a small number of relevant targeted keywords in moderation, they can only help you.
Avoid "stuffing" your keyword meta tags with too many keywords. Just use relevant tags
that apply directly to the content of that particular page.

Limit yourself to 10 keyword phrases per page maximum, and make sure they are all different from page to page. Many of my own pages have only three or four, because that's what's specific to that page.

4. Alt Tags
The small yellow box that comes up in Internet Explorer when your mouse cursor is placed over an image is called the ALT tag.

Every highly relevant image should have an alt tag with your key words or phrases
mentioned in the tag. For example, the ALT description might be "Oregon Widget company logo" instead of "companynamelogo.jpg".

As of early 2006, many experts believed that the ALT tag was no longer being considered for ranking criteria by some search engines. I believe that since the ALT tags still do get indexed and show up when searched for, that they do help, and I have continued to use them.

Undeniably, they cannot HURT you, and they will still help you with some engines. My recommendation is to continue to use them, at least one per webpage, and be sure to avoid "keyword stuffing". Besides, who knows when the pendulum may swing back the other way?

5. Header Tags

This is one of the most important factors used to determine the subject of a page by both humans and by search engines. It's called the header tag because it's a headline for the page.

The text of each page is given more weight by the search engines if you make use of header tags and then use descriptive body text below those headers.

No more than one H1 tag per page is acceptable these days, and any additional headlines should be bolded so they can still look the way you like.

Bullet points on the page and other bolded headlines for secondary phrases work well too, but it is not enough to merely BOLD or enlarge your primary page text headline.


6. Link Text
Search engine spiders cannot follow image links. In addition to having image links or buttons on your web pages, you should have text links at the bottom or elsewhere on the page. The text that the user sees when looking at the link is called the link text.

A link that displays products does not carry as much weight with the search engines as a link that says, "Oregon widgets". Link text is very important, and is actually one of the most frequently overlooked aspects of web design that I’ve seen.

A good use of this concept is to have your home text link (usually in the footer of your website) say, "Keyword Phrase Home" instead. This can be a powerful improvement that's easy to do.

7. Site Map
Using a site map not only makes it easy for your users to see the entire structure of your website, but it also makes it easier for the search engines to “spider” your site. When the search engine spiders come to visit, they will follow all of the text links from your main index page.

If one of those links is to a site map, then the spiders will go right to the site map, and consequently visit every page you have text linked to from the site map. On the site map page, try to have a sentence or two describing each page, and not just a page of links.

8. Relevant Inbound Links
Relevant links are links to similar industry or subject related sites. Right now, no single strategy can get your site ranked higher faster than being linked to by dozens of other relevant websites.

It used to be that the quantity of incoming links mattered most, but since November 2004, it's much better to have three highly relevant links from other popular related websites, than 30 links from unrelated, low ranked sites.

If there are other directly relevant businesses in your industry that you can trade links with that may actually benefit your users, then by all means, link to them, and have them link to you. It’s
proven and it works.

To see who’s already linking to you...
In Google type the following: "link: yourdomain.com", without the quotes. In Yahoo, the numbers will show as much higher, and the query string is different. Yahoo is "linkdomain:domain.com", and this is an excellent place to find information not only about your own links, but about your competition as well.

9. Add Good Content
Not to be forgotten of course, is that you add relevant content of your website on a regular basis to your website. Exactly how much content you should add, and how often, depends on what your competition is doing.

Your content must be relevant, helpful information that people want to read. These days, each webpage should be laser focused on one specific product or subject, in order to rank highly for that search phrase.

Ideally, each page should have between 400 to 650 words on it. Too few, and the search engines won't consider it to be relevant enough. Too many words and the search engine spiders may
have a hard time determining the actual subject or focus of the page.

Don’t overuse and repeat the same keywords over and over. Instead use synonyms and speak in a natural language. Reading it out loud to yourself is a great way to judge how natural your text sounds.

Concentrate on writing quality pages that actually appeal to the human reader. Write pages that provide the reader with exactly what they are looking for; that is, information about the exact
search phrase they’ve entered.

If you are writing content for the search engines, you will not be as successful as you would be if you are writing content for the reader about a specific subject.

10. Avoid Cheating
With all of these tidbits of information, it's tempting to think that you can stuff 100 keywords into your title, or create a page with the phrase "Oregon widget company" being used 100 times in headers, text links, ALT tags, bullet points etc., but that cannot help you. In fact, it can penalize you, and get your website banned from certain search engines. If something seems easy, or like a shortcut, then it probably is and will be frowned upon by the search engines and you will not be rewarded long-term.


Conclusion

There is no single magic bullet that will shoot you to the top of the search engines, but everything on this page is a piece of the pie, but it will help your website get spidered more often by the search engines, rank better in the results pages, and add money to your bottom line.

Scott Hendison – SearchCommander.com

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