5 SEO Errors to Fix to Boost Your Site Rankings

If you are not seeing results from your SEO strategy, you might need to take a step back from content creation, keyword research, and creating back links. Have you checked your website to see if there’s an issue on the site itself that is ultimately to blame? While there can be a lot reasons why efforts to improve your rankings are falling short, making sure that you have fixed the issues below is key to knowing that there isn’t something “under the hood” preventing you from reaching search engine ranking rockstar status.

302 (Temporary Redirect)

3xx HTTP response status codes are like road signs for search engine crawlers. If you are using 302 redirects for moved pages, URLs, or other content, this will cause search engine crawlers to treat the redirect as temporary and not pass any “link juice”, the buzz word for ranking power. There might be some instances in which you want to tell the crawlers that the change is temporary (such as seasonal ecommerce product listings), but in general, you want all of your moved URLs to be permanent. Keep your link juice flowing by replacing 302 redirects with 301 redirects.

Title Missing or Empty

Can you imagine walking into a bookstore and seeing blank covers on all the books? Would you spend the time picking up each book and reading through it to understand what it’s about? Nope. Well, neither do the search engines. The Title Element on each page is the most important place to identify keywords and associate a page with a topic. Make sure all of your pages have them.

4XX (Client Error)

Dead or broken links are a sure fire way to have search engines view your site as not relevant. This impacts your quality score, but what’s even worse is that a dead link can stop a search engine crawler in its tracks. You may be missing out on other pages even showing up in a search results page because a broken link has prevented the crawler from knowing that it’s there.

Duplicate Content

I like to equate duplicate content with sibling rivalry. Just like kids compete for their parents’ attention, pages on your website that are identical (or nearly identical) will compete with each other for search engine rankings. You can avoid diluting these results by making sure you don’t recreate content you already have on your site or have multiple URLs for the same page.

Meta Description Tag

Missing Meta description tags, don’t necessarily impact search engine rankings, however they, are extremely important in getting user click-through from search results. Think of these as your opportunity to engage the user and let them know that your content is the most relevant to their search. This description should be compelling while also using the keywords you want to target for your page content (all within 150-160 characters).

Sometimes, going back to basics is necessary. Fixing the fundamentals to make sure your site is “healthy” and error free can be an important step to building a solid foundation for SEO success. Not sure if you have any of these hanging around your site? We can run a free SEO Health check for you.

Image Credit: Jack Zalium