There is obviously quite a lot to work with in SEO. However, there are some very obviously mistakes that we see over and over again… Oh and here they are:

HTTPS

We have to start with this obvious one that we haven’t shut up about…

Back in 2014 Google announced that having a secure website is a ranking factor. This is something that a lot of developers and marketers ignored at the time. So, what’s changed?

Recently, Google Chrome has started marking websites as Not Secure, so everyone is paying attention now.

Here’s how to secure your website.

Slow Website

Another area which we continually remind everyone of is Website speed. This is huge for Google but is obviously beg for everyone. Nobody wants a slow website, do they?

Website speed is always a compromise between website design and page speed. You won’t always have a score of 100 with the Google Page Speed Tool but we recommend above 80, if you can.

Not Labelling Images

Search engines don’t really understand images, so we need to give them a hand if we want them to understand our images. There are three ways to do this:

  • Name your images correctly. DSC2917.jpg is not good for a search engine. seo-keyword-screen.jpg, is much better
  • Alt Tag – This stands for alternative tag. An obvious place to include text about what the image is.
  • Title Tag – Similar to Alt tag. Most browsers show this now when people hover over the image

This is a nice straightforward way to include relevant text on the page and also allow search engines to see what images are about – which helps with Image Search.

These are the three main ones we see recurring but there are many many more…