by Scott Allen

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Stoney and the crew at Pole Position Marketing created a
fictitious site called “Galaxy Quest Airlines”. Instead of just going through a
checklist of things to look for, he created an interactive audience
participation experience where the audience members peruse the site and find on-page
SEO problems with it, and then Diana Adams made live edits to the site.

These are issues that are common on many sites, and
something to look out for. Some of the problems found, included:

Homepage Issues

  • Splash Page
    • No content.
    • Extra steps for user.
  • Too many dashes in url
    • Not user friendly.
    • Hope users don’t forget hyphens.
    • Competitor could buy other domains and get type
      in traffic.


Site Navigation

  • Drop down forms used for navigation, which is
    not good for search engines because they often don’t read forms.
  • Inconsistency with header navigation on different
    pages.      


File Names

  • Underscores in some of the file names. Minor
    issue but for usability, helps to have hyphens instead.

Internal Linking

  •  “Click here” repeatedly used for link text. It
    is important to use meaningful text in the anchor text (text being linked) in
    order to pass value internally throughout the site.
  • Links are nofollowed. This prevents the passing
    of link value throughout the site.
  • Text isn’t linked to key pages.
  • Broken Links throughout site. *Be careful when
    using capitalization because servers are often case sensitive wit file names.


Server/Spidering Issue

  • Robots.txt – disallowing access to site. Important
    to have proper directives in robots.txt
  • META ROBOTS tag is blocking spiders
    (NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW).
  •  WWW vs non-WWW version of url – Pick one to use
    and have the other redirect via .htaccess.


Content

  • Duplicate content. There are large chunks of
    text  content repeated throughout the
    site.
  • Non-unique TITLE tags – creates duplicate
    content issues. Should be unique for each page.
  • Prominent Headlines should be in <H1>
    tags.


Images

  • Text is all in images – Unreadable to search
    engines.
  • Image ALT tags are missing. ALT tags can help
    provide value to search engines and help viewers who have image turned off or
    are using special readers for handicapped viewers.


HEAD tags

  • Keyword stuffing in META KEYWORDS. No need for
    keywords tag. At very least keep it minimal.

Code bloat

  • JavaScript and CSS should be in external so
    spiders won’t access each time, and will cache for users. Speeds up load time
    and makes easier for spiders.
  • Tags with no content
    (<H3>&nbsp;</H3>).


Code Errors

  • One example was many links that aren’t closed
    which means rest of page is linked. Keep code clean.
  • You can validate html/xhtml if you wish.

Site Map

  • This
    was inconsistent with the rest of site and looked more like a list of linked
    keywords.  Should have been like other
    pages with meaningful info.

Free White Paper: How to Optimize for Google
A free 10 page white paper on how to optimize a website on Google the right way – so the website succeeds.


Continue Reading: On-Page SEO WorkShop – SBM Unleashed

Random Posts