The Top 5 Areas Where SEO Problems Occur
Sometimes the task of fixing SEO problems can be overwhelming, but the following list can help to alleviate this daunting task. Most SEO problems occur within 5 basic areas. The list included here touches on each of these lists and can help you from wasting time by digging too deeply in any one particular area.
SEO and Meta Robots
The parameters for the meta robots tag on a website’s homepage and contents page can cause problems if not installed correctly. Since meta robots tags can be confusing to work with, checking to see if major pages have been incorrectly marked as “noindex” or “nofollow” can go a long ways to ensuring that the pages are indexed correctly. Checking out meta robots tags can take a good bit of time to do correctly. There are a number of “quick fixes” advertised, but they sometimes miss important elements.
SEO and Robots.txt Files
Sometimes all it takes is one wrong keystroke to ruin a website’s indexing. By checking the website’s robots.txt. file (which can be found at www.example.com/robots.txt), it can be discovered if the robots.txt files are blocking things that are important to the website. This is an SEO error that even professional web developers can easily make.
SEO and Canonical Homepage
If there is one thing that is known for interfering with a website’s ranking ability, it would be Canonicalization errors. Checking to make sure that a website’s homepage is canonical is an important part of SEO evaluation.
SEO and Text-Only Cached Version of a Homepage
If a the exact URL of a website’s homepage is not in the major search engines, you could very well be looking at a problem. It is important that the homepage be THE first result in a search for the exact URL. If it is not, there is a chance that the site is being penalized, which means that you have a very big problem indeed. If you are searching in Google, you need to make sure that you click on the “Text-only version” link to ensure that you keep JavaScript-based page elements as well as CSS and Flash from being included in the search. This sort of search will reveal unclear navigational as well as spammy links.
SEO and Google Site Commands
Checking the website from the search engine’s point of view can reveal things about a website that would otherwise be difficult (if not impossible) to root out. This is why it is very important to check how many pages on the site are indexed in the search engine. Very high numbers can indicate duplicate content while extremely low numbers can indicate crawler traps, both are bad for a site’s ratings.
A final word of advice; when you are asked to check a website’s SEO, go through these 5 things first. It can prevent you from spending unnecessary hours tracking down ‘phantom’ problems that can result by one or another of these listed items not being correct. Good luck to you!
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