Avoiding an SEO Faux Pas Once Readers Hit Your Web Page

by Victor Green
3 mins read

While it’s obvious that maximizing your email marketing campaign is a major part of growing and interacting with your audience, focusing only on this part of the process isn’t the best way to boost your brand’s web traffic. Sure, a great initiative starts with strong messages that get the shopper on the other side of the screen to click your link – but what happens once these viewers end up on your page? In addition to this group, what about the browsers who make their way to your site via Google or the other top search engines? To help you clean up your site and ensure customers have a great experience once you reel them in, here’s some of the top SEO faux pas out there and how you avoid them with a few simple and easy tips.

Incorrect Copy Phrasing

One of the simplest mistakes you can make with your site is having a web copy that doesn’t translate well to the viewers interests. For instance, skimping on descriptive language is a major slip-up. Matt Cutts, Google’s head honcho when it comes to SEO practices, gave a great example by comparing a page that contains “Mt. Everest Height” to one that includes “How high is Mt. Everest?”While the difference might seem subtle, the implications of the gap between the two are pretty big. The former is bland and generic, while the second poses a question that connects with your reader’s interests. To fix this, give your copy a once over and look for areas where more expansive wording could help flesh out the content in a positive. Aside from making a bigger impact on your viewers via email, doing this also has the added benefit of helping increase page visibility via Google’s recent shift toward favoring this type of formatting.

Broken Links

Another little issue that can cause some big problems is broken or incorrect linking to the other parts of your page. Naturally, interested readers will need to navigate to the different sections of your site to learn more about your products or services, so making sure these pathways always work is a good idea. Otherwise, you’ll end up putting your customers in a frustrating situation we’ve all experienced before – wanting to view a site, but facing down a broken link that stops this excitement dead in its tracks.

Meta Tag Duplicates

Taking things a little more toward the technical side of strong SEO tactics is the role of meta tags on your pages. The problem with this portion of the page is that many brands simply slap some generic tags on every page and call it a day. Unfortunately, all this does is create duplicate tag entries that do little to separate the actual content of your page. While this isn’t the end of the world as far as email generated visits, these duplicate tags can cause lasting damage for web crawlers looking to index your site. There’s nothing wrong with reusing terms in the meta tag section, just make sure you’re doing your best when it comes to describing what’s actually on the page.

“Click Here” Anchor Text

When it comes to the anchor text for your links, sometimes less isn’t always more. For instance, look at the links in this article. All of the anchor text helps describe what to expect once you’re redirected to the linked page. Unfortunately, plenty of pages decide to simply use generic terms like “click here” as a way to call viewers to action. However, you’re far better off making your anchor text as descriptive as possible – without making these links too unwieldy or awkward. Again doing this is good for the fluidity of your web page, as well as how your site fairs when it comes time for Google to rank it among the masses of others employing less than stellar anchor text practices.

Pages without Titles or Descriptions

The last major faux pas on the list is failing to take a few minutes to fill out the title and description section for your pages before you publish them. Not only is this practice easy to handle and a major asset for sorting and cataloging pages on your site, but it helps avoid an unsightly lack of text on any related search result pages. Considering that this snippet can say a lot about what to expect on your page for viewers coming across your content this way, don’t be afraid to put a little thought into what goes into the description. This way, regardless of whether your page visits come from great emails or any of the big name search engines, you’ll have everything in order as far as all the SEO tweaks go.

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