Photo by Marília Florêncio Santos
I looked through a new version of a website today in preparation for a “free initial consultation” I provided, and I was appalled at the DUMB SEO mistakes in this website — hence the topic for this blog post! Here’s what I found during a cursory review of this “professionally-prepared” website:
- None of the site pages used keywords in the page titles. Every page title consisted of the domain name of the site followed by a hyphen and then the page link title like, “home,” or “services.” The title is the most important SEO real estate on the each web page, and to use it to repeat the domain name is DUMB.
- None of the site pages included a meta description describing each page. Again, this is valuable web page SEO real estate, abandoned and unused, which is DUMB.
- None of the site pages include meta keyword tags. I know Google doesn’t use these anymore and perhaps most search engines accord them little weight, but it doesn’t cost anything to include them, so why not?
- None of the photos used in the website included alt tags describing the photos. This is an opportunity to perform a service for someone using a reader to access the web pages and it’s also an opportunity to use keyword-rich photo titles. An opportunity wasted, which is DUMB!
- From an ease-of-use perspective, the new site scored additional DUMB points by requiring the use of a CAPTCHA to contact the business. We can debate whether it’s wise to provide an email address in a site when that address can be mined by spammers, but a CAPTCHA on a Contact Us form is likely to cause some prospects to move to the next website in the search results. Plus, the form required seven items including the postal code. Was there a mention of a privacy policy associated with the collection of that information? Nope!
I don’t make my living doing high-powered search engine optimization for national brands, but I’ve learned the basics of good SEO to promote Web Word of Mouth and every web developer should too. A great guide to basic SEO is the one produced by Google and available for free called the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Read it and check what you learn against your own website.
