5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Whether you, or your website design company,  have been optimising your website pages or setting up a new strategy, it is very easy to make mistakes in SEO. These mistakes can have a significant effect on your page ranking but fortunately mistakes in SEO can be corrected. Below are 5 SEO mistakes to avoid:

SEO Mistake 1: Not using keywords correctly.

Many people who don't have much experience in SEO are concerned about being banned from the search engines for keyword spamming so they limit the use of keywords on their website pages. As long as your content sounds natural and is easy to read then the chances are you have not overused your keywords. Make sure your keywords are included in the first and last paragraphs, in your headings and in your title and meta tags.

SEO Mistake 2: Trying to fool search engine spiders.

Search engines are a lot more sophisticated than most of us realise. They recognise hidden text, keyword spamming, and cloaking (which is showing different content to the search engine spiders than to your visitors). All of these practices will simply hurt your page ranking and can in fact cause your website to be banned by the search engines, which means no one will find you - and no traffic means no profits!

SEO Mistake 3: Using Flash

Flash is a great presentation tool and can be your website look very exciting and user friendly, unfortunately for most website owners it’s just not necessary and can harm your page ranking. Search engine spiders cannot read content embedded in Flash files, which means they’re not indexed so will not show up on search ranking.

SEO Mistake 4: Using Only Your Company Name as a Title Tag

Your company name shouldn't be the only contents in your title tag. Feel free to include it, however it’s also important to use your primary keyword for each webpage title tag. This is more useful for your customers and helps the search engines identify the various pages on your site. Also it makes it easier to find from within the browser history.

SEO Mistake 5: Using A Splash Page

A splash page is a web page with a large graphic or company logo, and a link to enter the site. This is an ineffective strategy for a number of reasons:

• No keyword rich text on the page, nothing for the spiders to index.
• Only one internal link on the page
• These pages often have a redirect which often causes spiders to ignore them

If search engine optimisation is important to your business, you may need to skip the splash page.

Your home page should be very easy to navigate, full of useful contents with keywords and link visitors and spiders to other main website pages.

If you have committed a few of these mistakes as you were trying to out smart the spiders then simply correcting them can increase your page ranking almost immediately. Take some time to evaluate your SEO strategy and eliminate these SEO mistakes.

SEO Tip 4 - Page Linking

There are two different types of links – Internal and External. Every time you link to a page, post or other site, you are creating very useful optimisation to your website which helps increase your site ranking. If a page or post isn't important to your SEO strategy, then don’t bother linking it, but if you have to link it for user experience then use the “no follow” code so the search engines will know not to follow the link and that way all the valuable links will be followed. (A “no follow” link can be followed by a person, but not a search engine.)

An example of using the “no follow” attribute in html code:

<a href="http://websiteaddress.com" rel="nofollow">My Site</a>

Internal Links are links within your own site. For example, one post may contain a link to another post or page on the same topic. Developing internal links is a great way to show search engines the relevancy of your website, as well as assist human reader in finding valuable information. Just make sure that you are linking to related pages and not random pages as this kind of cross linking will have a negative effect on search engine robots!

2 key points to remember when internal page linking:

• Don’t link to a bunch of posts, pages, etc.. (particularly archive pages) from your sidebar.
• DO use a keyword as your link. Having a link that says “click here” does nothing for your search engine efforts.

External links are when you link from your website to another web site. Don’t link all the sites you like to your sidebar. This just gives away SEO to the other site. Use external links sparingly and strategically.

While the links back to your site from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn may not do anything for your official search engine results, they can do a lot for sharing useful information and driving traffic by bringing people to your website. Not only that, these websites link quite high on search engines so having your social media page resulting high up on search engine is as good as your website doing well on search engine results. The more useful your information, the more likely people are to pass it on to others. There’s nothing like word of mouth advertising.

SEO Tip 3 - Keyword Placement

Website content is a very powerful tool you can use in your search engine optimisation strategy.

Contents optimised with keywords and published/changed regularly can rank your website to the top of the search engine.

Keywords are part of how search engines determine the relevance of your site for a particular search and helps the searcher know if your site is what they are searching.

The term “keywords” does not refer to Meta Keywords, which are obsolete and no longer used by search engines. It is important to remember that people don’t search by keywords anymore, they search by terms or phrases so bear this in mind when writing and optimizing your content.

There are different opinions on how often you should use keywords or terms in your content. As a general rule, keywords should be used naturally, not forced into the content so that it reads awkwardly or unnaturally to a human being.

Many beginners are tempted to place their keywords in every single sentence on there website, or on the footer of the website design all separated by commas. Best way to get a good quality content that is easy to read and also keyword/keyphrase rich is to write your content and then go back and position your keywords. Make sure to sprinkle other relevant keywords throughout your content as well. Thereafter read the content out and get it checked by others.

Keywords positioning is very important to get the most out of your SEO efforts. Below are locations on your website where the keywords are recognised by search engines:
• Your headline
• Any headings or subheadings in your content
• The first and last paragraphs of your content

Consider using one primary keyword or term per page rather than using all the keywords throughout all the pages. Keep it simple and optimise each website page with one primary keyword. You could
include a secondary keyword that might be an extension of the primary keyword ensuring you don't end up incorporating too many keywords into one page, as this can easily be done, basically don't get carried away with 'Keyword Placement'!

SEO Tip 2 - Friendly Images

Search engine traffic from images is extremely underrated, especially when some website have more images than contents. As search engines cannot “read” images and any content on the image you need to make sure this is placed in the descriptions, tags, and titles you give your images. By doing this not only does your site looks good to the public but also works well for SEO.

All images should have ALT and TITLE attributes defined. This is the image equivalent of the doc title or Meta Description for the website page.

Image filenames should have a relevant name, ideally with a keyword in it. For example, an image filename of “web123.jpg” might make sense to you, the website owner or the website design company that created your website, but won’t mean anything to a search engine. “website-design.jpg” is a much more descriptive, and relevant, filename.

E-commerce website design tends to be orientated around having plenty of images to make the product they selling look good, but what use is a e-commerce site if you are not getting much traffic. by following the above you will be placing key phrases for each category  image, sub category image and product images, that is a lot of additional content and keywords  which will  surely help with search engine optimisation.

SEO Tip 1 - Meta Description

Most people are confused about how to use Meta Descriptions and end up using it incorrectly which.

Meta data serves very two simple purposes:

• tells search engines what your site is about
• displayed on search results, which tells people what your site is about

Meta Description doesn't actually affect your page ranking in the search engine results but it is important for what appears on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The Meta Description is what people see when searching on search engines and it helps them determine whether or not to click through to your website. As mentioned in my previous blog, high rankings are meaningless if nobody clicks on the links because the description isn't appropriate for humans or you get poor quality clicks to your website which results in high bounce rate.

A couple of key points to keep in mind when writing out your Meta Description for your website:

1. You are limited to 160 characters.
2. If you do not specify a Meta Description, the search engine will either automatically use the first 160 characters of your page or post for the description, or will examine the on-page content for what it thinks is the best description to use.
3. You want to have a naturally worded Meta Description, where it flows and easy to understand what your website page is all about.
4. Don’t over use keywords in your Meta Description.

When your website design is being done you concentrate on how good your site should look and have it eye catching as well as making sure it is rank as high as possible on search engines (SEO), but what we forget is ensuring content and meta is perfect so you get relevant clicks to your website as well as the visitor understanding the content and finding what they are looking for which creates a conversion for your website. Overlooking the meta and contents simply reduce clicks and increase bounce rate.

Why SEO Is Important

Website owners know that search engine optimization (SEO) is important because it drives a lot of traffic onto your website, but are not quite sure what needs to be done to get the results. There is a fair amount of misinformation about SEO and also because once you do start learning about it you don’t know what some of it means or what needs to be done, it is never black and white.

My next few blogs will be based on a few tips on specific SEO practice. This will be a foundation of tips, which when implemented, can make a significant difference. All website design should have these simple tips implemented but you will be surprised on how many don’t! We have selected easy tips to start with because you’re more likely to implement them and start seeing results before you get into the more complex elements.

SEO actually refers to search engine rankings that people click on and not just coming on page 1 of Google search. The information displayed on the search engine results page needs to be useful enough for the person who is carrying out the search wanting to follow the link to your site. In reality you can come to position 1 for a specific search result but people would still click on position 2 as it stands out to them.

Primarily, your website has to be useful for actual human beings. If you keep that in mind as you apply search engine techniques, it will be easier on you and will create better results in the long run.

How to Install Magento Security Patches? – Beginners Guide

Magento Security Patches are release to cover all the possible identified risk & vulnerabilities in Magento. Updating these patches makes your e-commerce website more secure. Not updating will make your Magento store more vulnerable to attacks. Magento periodically releases security patches which is recommended to be applied to your Magento store as soon as possible.

Below are the Magento security patches available as zip files which can be downloaded using the link below the list:

• SUPEE 1533
• SUPEE 5344
• SUPEE 5994
• SUPEE 6285
• SUPEE 6482

Download Zip file with all above patches here
Hosted on www.y-p.uk - Blackburn, Lancashire website design agency

Things to do before installing the patch:

Before updating anything on your website, please make sure you take a complete backup of your website files and database.

Make sure compilation has been disabled in your store before installing patches and after installation, kindly run the compiler – to take effect of the code patch. You can disable the compilation by going to Magento Admin Panel > System > Tools > Compilation

It’s important to flush the Magento cache before and after applying the patch. Flushing your caches can be done in the Magento admin under System > Cache Management.

Installing the patch:

Check your Magento version by logging into your website admin and identifying the version from the footer of the admin section.

Now extract the files from the relevant zip file for the security patch which match your version of Magento and then upload the extracted files to your website root, overwriting all existing files.

Now run the compiler to take effect of the code of the patch by going to System > Tools > Compilation and clicking on Enable.

Flush the Magento cache after applying the patch by going to System > Cache management and click on 'Flush Magento Cache'.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

Only follow these instructions if you know what has been updated on your site as some files that are replaced may have been modified which will effect your website design, only install the patch if you are certain the files being replaced are still the original Magento files (which should be the case if it is a well developed Magento site).