Search Engine Marketing

6 Common SEO Problems that Need Immediate Action

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Not everyone enjoys the benefits of good SEO. Many of us, mostly because of lack of knowledge, commit mistakes that made our SEO campaigns ineffective. I have personally experienced declines in the rankings of my old and present websites.

Although we can say that low search engine rankings are normal in this business, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially if you’re aiming for niche domination.

There are many causes of poor search engine rankings. To help website owners and beginners in SEO, I listed the six most common causes.

Lack of links
This may seem obvious, but many of us take this for granted. Just like SEO, link building is a continuous process. If you lack links, you miss out on traffic and opportunities for hits. Link building is essential in your SEO campaign, site statistics, and even branding.

404 and 301 errors, and other redirect issues
These two errors hinder SEO processes because they disappoint your visitors. Who wants to visit a site with too many redirects and errors? Nobody wants to get a blank page on his or her monitor when he or she expects a content-filled webpage.

301 errors are common when doing site redesigns and SEO audits while 404 errors occur due to renaming pages, misspellings in articles, having robot.txt files behind the website. You can resolve these issues by having your website design audited and by self-checking your page in Google.

Repetitive title tags
Google hates duplicate entities, whether in content, keywords, or title tags. Using duplicate content or site tags may get you penalized and blacklisted from Google’s search results.

Slow site speed
Google considers your site’s download and upload speed in their algorithm. If you don’t want site speed to pull down your website’s ranking, you can call your trusted web developer and have speed-related errors fixed.

Obsessing over webpage titles
Your website’s rank can suffer from your habit of constantly changing the titles on your website’s pages. Choose the ideal title for each webpage and stick to it. Changing your page titles regularly won’t help your efforts in SEO.

Title tags and link text error
Use only keyword phrases in the anchor text for title tags. Avoid phrases such as ‘click here’, ‘here’, and ‘we sell’. Edit these out because these just distract site visitors and search engine crawlers.

What are the common SEO problems that you have faced ? Feel free to share them with us.

This is a guest post by Warren Carter, if you want to guest post here check out our guest posting guidelines.

Image Credit: Sabekuji Kaneda

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26 comments

Helmi Asyraf | Kissing Crust March 15, 2011 - 6:27 pm
I dont agree with your point on "Obsessing over webpage titles" as I don't think it is a common SEO problem. As far as you know, I don't think people constantly change the titles on the website’s pages. Once the blogger hits the publish button, the possibility of title be changed is pretty low based on my experience. The only issue about title is on the effectiveness of title in relation of SEO. Don't you agree?
ZK March 15, 2011 - 7:29 pm
I don't change the title of the post or the URL structure once it's published. I ensure that the title and the structure includes keywords relevant for the post to rank on Google.
Tej Kohli March 15, 2011 - 11:34 pm
HI Warner Well its great one deals , But here I am facing a new problem , my client gives me a website which in asp and I am unable to write unique title and meta for each and every pages , Lets me know how Can I sort out duplicate meta and title problem
Warner Carter March 23, 2011 - 11:16 am
There may be some trick programming methods to fix that, others may have had this problem too and resolved it. A search may reveal an answer. I would make sure each page has at least 2-300 words of original text and uses the important keywords.
Clark Hetherington March 16, 2011 - 3:23 am
I totally agree to your posts Warner. I experienced a month of linking to other websites using the same anchor texts but instead of increasing traffic to my website, it lowers its PR! It really knocked a whole lot of me that time. Today, I avoided linking to other sites especially on article submissions using the same anchor texts.
Warner Carter March 23, 2011 - 11:20 am
Clark: those are probably related but other factors could be involved too. PR is one of the most mystic of indicators.
Alex March 16, 2011 - 3:52 pm
Hello Warner, You surely made some valid points but I can also add some one other common problem you might have that you should take immediate action. Although this is not SEO related I think it should be something every checks, it's how does the traffic you get converts, do you have thousands of visitors but none does what you want? Well, this practically invalidate all your SEO efforts. In SEO you can also check to see if you have lots of duplicate pages and you link to both of them, for example www version of your website and non www, if you link to both version, you practically lose link juice.
Warner Carter March 23, 2011 - 11:25 am
@Alex A very good point. I have seen reports of sites doubling their income from the same amount of traffic after doing a good conversion optimization. Split testing and getting visitor feedback can make a world of difference.
Kai Druhl March 16, 2011 - 3:56 pm
It helps to outline the content of future posts ahead of time, with relevant keywords included. That is something SEO folks do for static web pages, and it also works well for blogs. Even if you don't know the exact content yet, it helps you be alert to new ideas. And it removes much of the temptation to change titles and permalinks later.
Warner Carter March 23, 2011 - 11:28 am
@Kai. That sounds like a solid plan. You must be very organized
Maria Pavel March 16, 2011 - 5:49 pm
Well, we can't all make perfect SEO. Where would we be if we did? Rankings nowadays depend mostly on mistakes made by the competition. I those guys would do what you do, who know on what page you'd be instead of the first one. That's the thing, always be one step in front of competition, and that can only be done by trying to SEO perfectly.
Warner Carter March 23, 2011 - 11:30 am
@Maria someone said success comes from being 5% better than your competitors
Maria Pavel March 30, 2011 - 11:49 pm
Now all we need to do is find a way to measure the skill and aim for that 5% :)
Software Development Company March 17, 2011 - 9:47 am
SEO is on going process and content & backlinks are play important role in seo. Increase backlinks from different and relevant themes, title tag should be unique of every web page.
Aloys Jacobs March 17, 2011 - 5:23 pm
I actually had to change several titles on my blog once, along with doing other SEO stuff on each post like h2 and h3 tags, and as a result the serp position for most of the pages was improved. Granted, my SEO was lacking in the first place, but the lesson was, plan ahead instead of changing later. Should I had done so, my pages would have done better in the serps earlier. Stands to reason, but it ain't always apparent :)
Warner Carter March 23, 2011 - 11:32 am
@Aloys Good Point
Jerry Hill March 19, 2011 - 2:04 pm
I loved the picture at the beginning, it made me laugh and set the tone. The article contained some great information, but in the end there are times I picture myself using the explosives on my sites. ;)
Warner Carter March 23, 2011 - 11:47 am
@Jerry I know what you mean. Thanks for commenting.
Kavya Hari March 28, 2011 - 5:34 am
I agree with the second point.Because a few web sites are shown as 404 or 301 error and its look very horrible when we visit any web sites.
Devon Web Designs March 29, 2011 - 8:47 am
Thanks Carter, for emphasizing on the smaller SEO factors that people often misses out. Another important thing is to resolve canonical issue.
Warner Carter March 31, 2011 - 1:55 am
@Kavya and @ Devon, You make good points and thanks for the props.
Kavya Hari April 1, 2011 - 5:57 am
Duplicate content has been reduce page rank. So, better have to write original content in your post:-)
Warner Carter April 1, 2011 - 10:39 am
@Kavya - after the Panda Update people really need to pay attention to producing quality original content more than ever.
hcgdrops August 22, 2011 - 11:47 am
We've observed the same challenge with linkbuilding for e-commerce companies and are trying to help them be more effective at deeplinking.
Warner Carter August 24, 2011 - 9:29 am
@hcgdrops Deep linking is a good idea for solving that problem. See if you can also add resources that the customers would find useful and link to.
grey oaks real estate October 13, 2011 - 11:06 pm
Excellent point! 301 redirect should be fixed as soon as possible as this may cause duplicate content and lessen your link value. You can do this by accessing your .htaccess file.
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