Are You Making These SEO Mistakes? – Part 3

SEO Web Design

This is the latest instalment in our ‘Are You Making These SEO Mistakes?’ series. Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t yet!

Now, onto a few more SEO mistakes you might be making with your blog or website:

 

Your Website Pages Lack Meta Descriptions

Each page on your website should have a meta description. They don’t by default, though, so this is something you must be sure to add whenever you publish a new page or blog post.

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The meta description is super important because it’s what Google pulls into their search results to display beneath each website link. Make it compelling and informative enough that someone will actually click onto your website. If you leave the meta description blank, Google will automatically pull in the first several words on the page to display as a description – and often these do very little to explain the content of the page, much less in a way that’s interesting enough to warrant a click-through.

The easiest way to add meta descriptions to your web pages is to use the Yoast SEO plugin (read this article we wrote to learn more about using it). Be sure to keep the description under 156 characters, as Google will cut off anything after that point. And most importantly: incorporate some of your keywords into the meta description. Google does look at this description when determining keyword rankings.

 

You’re Not Using Header Tags Correctly

As a best practice, every page of your website should have one main header. This header should theoretically be the name of that page, optimised with one of your keyword phrases if at all possible, contained within h1 tags.

Beyond that, each page should have subheaders whenever possible. Not only do subheaders help organise the information on a page and break it down into easily digestible parts for the reader, but they help Google determine what the page is about. For this reason, include keyword phrases that you’re aiming to rank for whenever possible.

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Subheaders are contained within h2, h3, h4… tags. Unlike h1 tags, you can include more than one of each type of subheader tag on any given page. Also, do not include long sentences or paragraphs of text within your header tags just to make them stand out more – that’s not the purposes of h-tags.

For more information on how to use header tags correctly, check out this article we wrote about web design best practices.

 

Your Homepage Has No Content

Have you ever come across a website with beautiful images on its homepage, perhaps with links leading to other pages that outline services or products offered, or that contain photo galleries with even more imagery?

These websites may look pretty cool, but the truth is that they’re absolutely terrible for SEO. Why? Well, Google parses through text contained in your website code to determine what the site is about and how to go about ranking it. If the homepage doesn’t have any text, then Google doesn’t have much to go off of and therefore has no reason to rank your site higher than others.

Our advice? Make sure your website homepage contains heaps of useful text that is optimised for your keyword phrases.

 

 

Rock Solid Marketing is an SEO agency in Mildura & Melbourne. Contact us to learn more about how to set your website up for SEO success with our Melbourne SEO services!

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