In today’s competitive online and offline marketing arena, there are plenty of businesses looking for a step up in the realm of search engine optimization. However, there are 9 road blocks that many companies experience throughout their website design and optimization campaigns. We have pointed out nine of those obstacles on this article so that you can be aware of the potential red flags.

  1. Flash Websites – Unless done properly (which most are not), flash websites can not be read by the search engines. Flash is not too much more than graphically pleasing images. Any text in a flash website is part of the flash image, and not part of the site. A simple check to see if this is the road block for your site is to view the site source (Right click > View Source) and see if you can make out any of the same text in the code as you see. If you can’t make it out, neither can the search engines.
  2. Clunky HTML Websites – Search engines read the HTML code of a website to find text and links. Basically, if a search engine spider goes through your code and had to read clunky html (lots of tables, unnecessary tags, invalid code, css in the html, etc.), it has a hard time collecting the information it needs and may even give up and move on.
  3. Poor Keyword Management – First, it’s important to know what keywords your customers are searching to find you. Once you know that, then they have to be included in your website, and often. Places to include your keywords are title tags, meta descriptions, image alt tags, image names, urls, link titles, header tags, lists, etc.
  4. Poor Website Navigation – Often many designers will use JavaScript for navigation bars. Although it will look nice, your navigation will not be visible to the search engines. And since search engines index websites by crawling from page to page, it’s important that you have a navigation system that the search engine can see and can access any page on your site within 2 clicks from the homepage.
  5. Lack of Links – Without links, your site has no importance. To see how many links you have and who is linking to you, go to Yahoo and search your site url with “link;” before it (ex. link:http://www.example.com).
  6. Ignoring the Title Tag – Many websites ignore the title tag on a website. This is one of the most important places to put your company name and / or keywords. The site title is the link you click on in most search engine results, including Google. A title tag that says “Welcome” or “Site Title” does nothing for your site in the search ranking. To see if this is hurting your ranking, check the top of your browser (above file, edit, view etc.) and see what is written in the top bar. Are your keywords there? Is your company name?
  7. Poor URLS – Simply put, a url of http://www.example.com/wallingford-real-estate.html is better than http://www.example.com/homes.html or http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content§ionid=4
  8. No use of H1, H2, H3 tags – These are your page header tags. Imagine a newspaper without headlines. To see if your site is using header tags, check your code (View Source) and search for <h1>Example</h1> or <h2>This is a Header 2 example.</h2>
  9. Poor META website descriptions- Like the title tag before, this is often ignored, but extremely important to search engine optimization. This is the text that shows up in a search result below the page title. To make sure your Meta Description is correct, check your code and look for a line like: <meta name=”description” content=”Keyword loaded description of a website with around 50-70 characters of text.”

So, while this makes plenty of sense to people in the industry, this information may also be a bit confusing to a lot of our readers. Don’t fear, though, because you can leave all your questions and/or comments in the section below, or you can simply call us today!

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If search engine optimization (SEO) is something that you are interested in but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.

Sources:
“The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing”-E-Book
SlideShare.net
Image Source: HubSpot, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing”, E-Marketer.com