Every day we spot missed opportunities online. Often, many of these problems are simple to remedy. Here the top five missed opportunities we come across on a regular basis:
1. Missing or duplicate meta data – Having no meta data or having it simply repeat the brand is an obvious SEO problem that is easy to fix most of the time. The same goes for duplicate meta data – sometimes the developers will repeat the same meta tags throughout the whole website, which the search engines may read as duplicate content, resulting in a failure to rank.
2. Text as images – Content is king online, so dont lock up your text in Flash or as images, no matter how cool it might look. If you dont give the search engines content to crawl you will have a hard time ranking no matter what else you do.
3. No internal linking – A solid internal linking strategy helps your users navigate through your site and it ensures that the search engines crawl and rank your website.
4. Missing or irrelevant alt tags – If you have images on your site, it is a simple matter to ensure that keywords are placed in your alt tags, and it will definitely have a positive effect on your rankings. Also, it helps users who cannot view the images for whatever reason (they are visually impaired, they have a slow connection, or they are using a substandard browser like IE6) understand the content on your site.
5. No robots.txt file – This file tells the search engines what pages of your site should be indexed and what should be ignored. Even if there are no pages on your site that you want to leave out of the search results, this file is still essential as it helps the search engine crawlers determine what to do with your sites pages.