5 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
Do you want to optimize the natural referencing of your website but don’t know how to do it? Are you afraid of having made some SEO mistakes or of making them again? Don’t worry; you are not the only one!
Today, we are returning to 5 of the most common SEO mistakes on the web!
Broken links or without strategy
Links, or linking, are important in SEO and the user experience. They allow you to push certain pages, take advantage of the visibility of third-party sites and drive your users to the pages you want.
Ideally, identify one or two mother pages: the pages where you want to take your visitors. For example, regarding the presentation of your services, online store, reservation or contact page, the nature of your mother pages will change according to your objectives. The other pages, the daughter pages, will aim to lead to the parent pages as soon as possible.
For example, a hotel site may post blog posts (parent pages) about regional or local events near the hotel. These pages will lead to a parent page (the page that describes the rooms to be rented in detail or directly to the booking page).
Finally, on fairly old or complete sites, it is easy to break a link by mistake or delete a page by forgetting to remove the links. Be careful about this: people hate to come across a dead link.
Too long URL addresses or with underscores
Users and search engines prefer clear and, if not short, URL structures of adequate length. Long URLs should therefore be avoided.
Also, use dashes (the famous “hyphens of the 6th”: – ) and not underscores (or “hyphens of the 8th: _ ) in your URL addresses. Why? Because some search engines, including Google, do not consider the underscore as a word separator.
To simplify, a page with the URL “restaurant_chinois_lyon” will only be found in Google results by searching exactly for the terms “restaurant_chinois_lyon”. If you search for “Lyon Chinese restaurant”, you will not find the page concerned.
Concretely, the page’s content also plays a role and can counter this aspect. Thus, some sites manage to position themselves well despite the underscores in their URL. But this is to put obstacles in the wheels. Prefer the underscores of 6 to give you the best chances if your site is recent or under construction.
Duplicate content
Google hates duplicate content. How do you know what content to put forward? Not to mention copyrights and related rights. It is very easy, on the Internet, to know if you have stolen your content from a competitor. Apart from the legal risks, if your users notice that your content is a replica of another site, you lose their esteem and desire to stay on your site.
It is therefore strongly to be avoided. And it is also a mistake and bad practice, unfortunately very widespread. According to a study on 100,000 websites and 450 million pages, 65% of sites would use duplicate content simultaneously.
Missing meta descriptions
It is common to find sites that do not fill in the meta description of their pages.
But if the search engines do not pay particular attention to this, it is from the users’ point of view that it can become problematic.
Indeed, if you don’t fill out a meta description, the search engines will decide what text to display on their results pages. Words cut off, incoherent sentences out of context, etc., this type of preview will always be less attractive than a neat and concise description. This could make users prefer a competing site on the search results page…
Missing or too long title tags
As for the meta description, not filling your title tag leaves the choice to the search engines to display the title of their choice (cut, unsuitable, etc.). A title that is too long will be cut off.
From an SEO point of view, you can put some strategic key phrases in your title tag (or SEO title). On the users’ side, think about the click rate! Internet users will always prefer to click on a complete, clear, coherent title rather than on a line cut too early.
