Top SEO Sins for Small Businesses to Avoid
There are many articles on the web that give you good advice about search engine optimisation, ie ensuring that your website has every chance of ranking well in search engine (mostly Google’s) results. Yet we still see many small business websites that employ poor or even ‘black hat’ techniques in an attempt to rank above their competitors. So, whether you’re just unaware of the pitfalls or you’ve been badly advised by some of the more unethical SEOs out there, here are some SEO sins that you should avoid.
Duplicate titles and descriptions – Each page of your website will have what are called ‘metatags’ in the source code which describe the content of the page. There are usually 3 metatags: title, description and keywords. The keywords metatag is no longer used by Google for ranking websites, probably due to spamming. The other 2 tags are used, however, and frequently appear as the emboldened title and snippet (page description) in the search engine results. It makes sense, therefore, to ensure that each page has a separate title and description, otherwise search engines might think it’s duplicate content and ignore it.
Overuse of Images and/or Flash – Right now Google’s crawlers can’t recognise images or Flash content very well, so if your website contains lots of either then Google won’t be able to understand what your site is all about. Ensure your site also includes text in the form of h1 headings as well as main body text and that any images have alt tags which will display if, for some reason, the images do not.
Keyword stuffing – This refers to the practice of stuffing your keywords as many times as possible into your website content and/or your keyword metatag (probably why the latter is no longer taken into account by the search engines). This is an old ‘black hat’ seo technique that the search engines sussed long ago and is likely to get your website penalised. It’s also fairly obvious to your website visitors and makes you look untrustworthy. Do your keyword research to find out what words and phrases your visitors will use to find you and ensure that these are included in a logical and readable fashion. For more info, see our previous blog on Optimising your Website.
Cloaking – This is the dodgy technique of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. In short, it means that what the search engine thinks it sees is not what is presented to the user. This is regarded as a deceptive practice and will get your site removed from the search engine index.
Hidden text – This refers to the practice of ‘hiding’ text on your website so that it’s visible to search engines but not to the human eye. Examples include text that is the same colour as the background (eg white text on a white background) or text that is hidden behind an image. This is another own goal that could get you removed from the search engine index altogether.
Duplicate and/or scraped content – Duplicating the text on your own website or copying it from someone else’s website is a good way to get downgraded.
Multiple h1 tags – You should only have one h1 heading tag on each page of your website. Think of it as a chapter title that tells both the user and search engine what the content is about. Google reads multiple h1 heading tags as potential spam, so if you have other titles that you would like to highlight, use the h2-h6 heading tags to create a hierarchical structure on the page.
Broken links – Links to other pages on your website or to pages on other people’s websites can be helpful to your visitors as well as the search engines, but too many broken links (ie links that go nowhere other than a 404 error page) could get you penalised. Check them regularly.
Too many outgoing links or no outgoing links – There was a time when some website owners wouldn’t link to anybody else’s site for fear of giving away their own page rank. This is no longer the case and it’s considered good practice to link to complementary sites or to sites whose content you have quoted or referred to. In fact, not linking out at all could get you penalised. Again, just make sure the sites you are linking to are reputable and relevant. Conversely, too many outgoing links compared to the amount of content starts to look suspiciously like you’re selling links or not offering quality content – either way, it’s a penalty!
Paid links – Links to your website from other reputable websites with quality content (often known as backlinks) will help your website rank well in the search engine results. Beware of any websites that offer to link to you for a fee, however, as this is strictly against search engine guidelines and, by the same token, don’t sell links on your own website to third parties. Reciprocal links with external sites that are complementary to your own or add value in some way for your visitors are okay.
Not including your address on your website – This one has been included because it’s now a legal requirement in the UK for your address to appear on your website, so it’s a sin from that point of view (see Keeping Your Website Legal). However, if you want to attract local customers to your business, then leaving it out is a shame because it will negatively affect your local search rankings (see How to Improve Your Rankings in Local Search).
Robots.txt file applied to your whole website – There may be some pages on your website that you don’t want Google to index and potentially show in search engines results. To prevent Google’s crawler from seeing these pages, you can use a robots.txt file to tell it which pages to ignore. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, you could accidentally apply this to more pages than you intended or even your whole site! If your site seems to have disappeared from search engine results, get your webmaster to check your robots.txt file.
