Top 5 On-Site SEO Mistakes New Site Owners Make

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So you’ve just set up your new website, you have a killer business idea, and you’re ready to start making money. Unfortunately, many new site owners assume that just by having a great looking website and a solid business idea, their site will start generating traffic as soon as it goes live. The bad news is that’s typically not the case. But the good news is even if you’re not an SEO expert, there are still several things you can do to improve the optimization of your site that will set it up for success from the start.

1. Lack of Keyword Research

Solid keyword research is the foundation of any successful SEO efforts. Keyword research involves a lot more than just using words that you think describe your business or service on-site. The first big mistake site owners make is assuming that the words they think are relevant to their site are the keywords people really are searching for. If you optimize your site for keywords that are relevant but that no one is actually searching for, you probably won’t see the site traffic increase you were hoping for. So how do you find relevant keywords that actually have search volume? The Google Keyword Tool is a great free tool that can help you get started.

For example, let’s say I’m looking into keywords for my Salt Lake City HVAC site. First, I would enter in my initial keyword ideas that I thought were most relevant to the services my company offers. Next, I would select the “[Exact]” option in the Match Types column, as the data is typically more accurate for SEO results (rather than PPC). Then I would hit “search” and find the data that Google had for my keywords:

The result for my entered search terms are shown in the upper portion of the page. You’ll notice that there is a difference between the two keywords that are highlighted in the yellow boxes. One keyword has data for “Local Monthly Searches” and one doesn’t. The point of using this tool is to find the keywords that have the most search volume, but the lowest competition, allowing your site to rank for them more easily. It’s generally not effective to focus your SEO efforts on keywords that don’t show any reported search volume.

A good rule of thumb for new sites is to narrow down a list of 10 relevant keywords to optimize your site with. Once you reach high rankings for those keywords, you can definitely expand your list.

2. Keyword Stuffing

SEO has changed a lot in the past decade, and it used to be all about keywords. Keywords are still important, but search engines now use hundreds of different factors to rank sites. People used to come up ways to stuff as many keywords into their site as possible, essentially tricking the search engines into ranking their site higher. This involved things like putting hundreds of relevant words in the meta keywords tag, keyword cloaking (placing thousands of keywords on your site, but disguising them in the same color as the background), and many more bizarre methods.

Search engines have become a lot more intelligent over the past several years, and these methods don’t work anymore. In fact, keyword stuffing can even harm your site’s rankings as search engines view it as spam. Ironically though, some people still think that on-site keyword usage is the end-all of SEO (don’t be one of them!).

Yes, your page content should incorporate your targeted keywords, but they shouldn’t be used so much that visitors can’t even decipher what the message of the content is. The best rule of thumb is to shoot for about 3% keyword density on any given page of your site. For example, if you have about 400 words of content on a web page, about 9-10 of those should include keywords.

3. Not Utilizing Other On-Site Content Elements

In addition to actual page text, there are several other places on-site where you can utilize your targeted keywords. These include the page title tag, page meta description tag, header tags (<h1>, <h2>) and the Alt image tag. A lot of the time, these elements get pushed to the wayside and aren’t even considered when creating the site. Most content management systems even provide the fields for you, and all you have to do is fill them in. Here’s a quick breakdown for you.

Meta Description: While search engines don’t place as much value on meta descriptions when ranking your site, they are still very important for organic visitors, as they see the content in your results page snippet (see image above). Meta descriptions should likewise use the targeted keywords and have reader-friendly content. Limit your content to 160 characters (including spaces).

Alt image tag: Though the alt image tag content is immediately visible to site visitors, search engines are able to see the content in the site code, and it’s another great way to use your targeted keywords to increase site relevancy. The alt image attribute found in the image tag of your site coding looks something like this:

<img src=”/sites/yoursite.com/themes/epic/images/photo_banner1.png” alt=”insert alt image content here“/>

Alt image tags should describe the image, but can also incorporate your targeted keywords. Keep the length shorter, similar to what you would write for an image caption or title.

4. Ignoring Necessary Redirects

Not implementing the proper redirects for your site can have a big impact on how your site ranks. Though sites have one consistent URL, there may be different versions of that URL (especially for the home page) that search engines see as completely different pages. For example, some sites have a home page that shows under three different versions:

http://youriste.com

http://www.yoursite.com

http://www.yoursite.com/home

Though to any visitor, these pages look the exact same, search engines see them as completely separate. Implementing a 301 redirect can fix the problem of having multiple URL versions. Whether you choose the www or non-www version of your URL as the authority, be sure that all subpages use the same format.

5. No Sitemap

Sitemaps are particularly important for brand new sites that are trying to be indexed and ranked by search engines. A sitemap is typically found on the /sitemap.xml subpage of a domain, and it contains a listing of all the pages of the site. Having an accessible sitemap from the beginning can help give your site a jumpstart for getting indexed and ranked, as it provides an easy way for search engines to “see” your site. Most content management systems provide an easy way to create an auto-generated sitemap that can then be submitted to search engines. But In case you don’t have that option, you can generate a free sitemap using several services online.

Well, there you have it. Keep in mind that these tips mostly cover on-site SEO elements, and SEO involves both on-site and off-site optimization (link building). With this info, you should have the basics to nudge your new site in the right direction, giving it the best possible chance in the midst of your competition.