Creating a shiny new website is an exciting process – it’s like seeing your vision come alive, ready to take on the online world. Part of entering the online arena is thinking about getting your website in front of the right people by showing up on – yes, you guessed it – the search results pages. It many not seem interesting or important, but thinking about search engine optimisation (SEO) as early as possible in the website creation stage can determine how many people will actually see or find your website once it launches.
Don’t let your website be buried treasure! We’ve seen plenty websites that have made SEO mistakes, resulting in poor online visibility. To help your website take off from the get-go, we’ve compiled these five most common SEO mistakes people make during site creation that you will want to avoid.
URL Structure
URLs are a fundamental building block of SEO that are often overlooked. A site’s URLs should be constructed in a logical way that is understandable to the person reading it.
Whenever possible avoid using session IDs, and shorten URLs by removing unnecessary parameters. Add a descriptive keyword about the page to your URL and keep URLs as simple as possible.
Finally, make use of canonical tags! These are used when there are multiple versions of the same page. Canonical tags consolidate duplicate pages. Choose the best URL out of the duplicate pages and canonicalize them to the best URL. This will avoid you indexing the same page multiple times. Learn more about canonical tags!
Unoptimised Page Titles
Title tags determine what is displayed in your search engine result. A page title is a descriptive snippet about your page and influences the click-through-rate to your page. Page titles are not only displayed on Google SERPs, but are also shown at the top of the web browser tab.
To generate SEO friendly title tags, make sure you don’t exceed the 70-character limit so your whole title tag shows. Do not keyword stuff — this means avoid listing keywords repetitively. It’s best practice to include 2 keywords that are the most relevant. Lastly, make your title unique and catchy, and where possible, place keywords at the beginning.
Don’t forget to write a title that will grab your users and make them want to click!
Thin Content
Content is one of the most important factors when trying to achieve SEO success. Having up to date, frequent & relevant content makes a huge difference in a site’s ranking ability. If you can get your content right then you are well on your way to ranking for the specific terms you are targeting.
Content quality comes down to offering unique information to your visitors that they won’t find anywhere else. But it’s not just about having a good topic that is well-researched. The next SEO mistake that people make is not including solid keyword research.
No Proper Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step anyone should take when you start creating your site or writing content. Proper keyword research allows relevant users to find your site, which increases your chance of converting a user.
The best way to stay on top of this is to do regular keyword research, understand the benefits of long-tail keywords and regularly check the change of your keyword rankings which can be done by using Google Search Console.
Neglecting Google Analytics
Start getting familiar with Google Analytics now, or regret it later. From day one, track the users that are visiting your site and setup conversion tracking – whether you are selling products, trying to generate leads, or providing content. Google Analytics tells you how many people are coming to your site, their demographic, user journey and much more.
With Google Analytics you can see the engagement people are having on different pages and see how they are getting there and what their landing and exit pages are. The ability to collect and interpret this data is invaluable for anyone that has just built a website and looking to grow.