It’s that time again, another enlightening Matt Cutts video has been released, and here at Wikimotive, we’re ready to break it down with you. This one is all about the top 5 SEO mistakes that webmasters make. Now, it’s not the top 5 as far as severity of penalty, it’s the top 5 ranked by frequency, so there’s a decent chance one of these may apply to your SEO for small business efforts!
Here are the top 5 mistakes as listed by Matt Cutts:
1. Not making your site crawlable.
Click through your own site and ensure you can navigate to every relevant page without having to do a lot of hunting.
2. Include the right words on the page.
His example is Mt. Everest elevation. If your site gives that information, it’s not enough to just write “Mt. Everest elevation: 29,029′.” You need to think about what people actually search. In this case, a more likely search is, “how high is mt Everest,” so be sure to include that on your site as well! Additionally, if you have something like a restaurant menu, make sure it’s not just an image. Your menu should be crawlable!
3. Forget about link building. Think about creating compelling content and marketing.
Matt is reiterating Google’s recent shift away from backlinks. Of course, links are still important, but he encourages business owners to not get stuck in the link-only frame of mind. Build great content and start utilizing non-traditional marketing techniques to drive more traffic. Truly successful sites have great content, which pulls in more links organically.
4. Make sure you have the title and description set on your pages.
Matt says to ensure you have the title and description set on your most important pages. We’ll go one further and say make sure you have the title and description set on EVERY page. It’s really not that much work and it’s easy to maintain moving forwards.
5. Not using the webmaster resources.
There is a plethora of resources out there, for both Google and Bing. You can find their webmaster tools with a simple search, and you can see more of Matt Cutt’s video series right here.