Horrible Website Issues that Could be Hindering your Organic Rankings

So you just started a website or you have had your website up for awhile now but you can’t seem to figure out why you are not moving up in the search engines.  Well there could be a number of things that are hindering your rankings. But here are some of the most common reasons why:

1.     Titles –

§  Your web page title is easily one of the most if not THE most important part of optimizing your website.  The title tagis the first thing the Search Engines can see. Be sure you are utilizing a custom title tag on every one of your pages, as well as you are utilizing a keyword inside that title tag. A good rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t go over eighty characters when it comes to your title. The reason for this is because Search Engines only place so many characters inside the SERP listing. So you want to make sure they can fit your whole title inside your listing.

2.     Redirects –

§  I talked about this last week on how you not having redirects in place can throw off your rankings as well as possibly give you a duplicate content issue. Be sure that your .htaccess file is working properly and the proper redirects are in place so you are not wasting your link juice.

3.     Backlinks –

§  I recently did a whole series on how to run a successful link building campaign. Do some digging and find out how many backlinks you have compared to your competition. Utilize some of the strategies I have talked about and try and build up some backlinks for your site. Maybe you are just lacking some quality backlinks to your site which is a reason why you are losing rankings or why you are not ranking at all. Adding backlinks is something you need to constantly do, if you miss a month you could easily fall behind your competition. Having a strong linking strategy is always important

4.     Content –

§  Is your content fresh? Are you adding new content frequently? Is your content unique? Are you using keywords in your content? These are just some questions you should be asking yourself. If you have ever wondered why blogs do so well in the search engines this is the main reason right here – the Search Engines love LOVE fresh content and SEO Copywriting. Add content to you site where you can. Create a blog and talk about your product or service. Adding content is a great way to get your keywords out there.

5.     Internal linking structure –

§  Is the menu navigation the only way that your visitors can reach other pages of your site? If so, this is not ideal.  You want to make sure you are using internal linking throughout your content. If a word or phrase relates to another page on your site. Link to that page.  Especially if you want to get that page ranked as well. Try and be sure that you are linking using a keyword that page is targeting. That way you will pass value to that page and associate that keyword to be related to that page.

6.     External links –

§  Are you linking out anywhere on your site or page you are trying to get ranked? If you are, make sure you look at those links. Make sure they are relevant to your service and make sure the site is not spam. If a site you are linking to is spam, there is a good chance the Search Engines will think you are spam as well. Be careful who you are linking to and link only to sites that you feel are trust worthy.

7.     Keyword usage –

§  This can be debated by many SEO Company’s. Some say that keyword density does not have an effect on anything anymore. While I personally believe that to be somewhat true,  I still feel that having your keyword in your title, meta description, header, and inside your content helps tremendously. I’m not saying to spam those places but utilizing your keyword at least once in those mentioned above will help tell the Search Engines what the page is about. Again DO NOT SPAM the keyword. Utilizing the keyword inside your content ever 100-150 words would suffice and not appear to be spammy.

There are many other issues your website may have but these are just some common ones that, through my analyses, I have noticed clients lacking. If you have made some of these changes and still have yet to see a difference in your rankings. Keep digging you are bound to find what is wrong. Sometimes it is as simple as the Search Engines not having found everything on your site. I hope these points have helped some of you. Most of these will be basic for more advanced SEO’s but for others I hope they have helped.