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 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.

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).