My Blog SEO Fail

My Blog SEO Fail

I received an email from GoDaddy recently which had an ad relating to their Search Engine Visibility product in it, it intrigued me so I went and had a look, I thought it sounded ok and then signed up for the minimum period (3 Months) assigned the product to this site and gave it a go.

The initial report I got is below.

Proper Title Tags

Well-constructed title tags contain the main keyword for the page, followed by a brief description of the page content. It will be less than 65 characters and avoid using stop words such as: a, if, the, then, and, an, to, etc. Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and commas.

Look out! The majority of your pages have title tag issues.

2 pages have invalid title tag characters.

21 pages have stop words in the title.

5 pages have title > 65 characters.

Proper Description Tags

Good description tags contain information about the page’s content and persuade search engine users to visit your web site. They should be between 25 and 35 words in length.

Look out! The majority of your pages have description tag issues.

1 page has non-alpha characters in the description meta tag.

212 pages have no description tags.

Proper Keywords Tags

Your keywords meta tag should contain between 5-10 keywords or keyword phrases that are also found in page content.

Look out! The majority of your pages have keywords meta tag issues.

1 page has keyword tags with > 15 keyword phrases.

170 pages have no keywords meta tag.

Proper Heading Tags

Each page of your site should use at least the H1 heading tag for the search engines that examine it when crawling your site.

Great work! No significant heading tag issues to speak of.

10 pages have heading tags that do not match keywords.

Page Content

Pages should have between 300 and 700 words of descriptive content that contains the keywords specified for the page.

Look out! The majority of your pages have page content issues.

225 pages have a highest meta tag keyword density of less than 2%.

Proper Navigation

Each page of your site should contain links to every other page so search engine spiders can find every page. This is a critical step for the proper indexing and page rank distribution of your site.

You have navigation issues on some pages.

23 pages have broken external links.

Proper Sitemap

It’s important to use two site maps for your website–an XML version and a static version. The XML version can be created with Search Engine Visibility’s site map tool. The static version should sit on a static HTML page and contain links to every other page.

Great work! You’re using a proper site map.

Controlled Crawling

It’s important that search engine spiders find your robots.txt file that guides spiders to pages and directories you want crawled and denies entry to protected areas of your site.

Great work! You’re using a robots.txt file.

Duplicate Content/Tags

Because search engines treat web sites as a grouping of pages and not a single entity, each page on your site should be unique so that the tags and content differ between each page. Doing so increases the number of pages that will rank.

Great work! No significant duplicate tag issues to speak of.

10 pages are using the same title tag.

Word Density

Pages should contain 300 to 700 words of unique and descriptive content. A page’s meta tag keywords should also be those that occur most frequently on the page.

Look out! You have major word density issues.

225 pages have their most frequent word appear less than 2% of the time.

It looks grim going by the information they gave me so I decided to look further into it, the main Gui is shown below.

The top of the page shows that I have 819 errors and 31 warnings on my site, which all sounds rather dire until I saw something else on the top of the page stating this (348 pages found!) I don’t have 348 pages in my blog at all! I wondered where this program was picking up these pages from, going through each of the buttons shown in the pic above it soon became obvious to me what was happening.

Have a close look at the pic above, it has picked up Categories as pages, I also found out that that it has picked up Tags as pages as well, I now know where all the pages came from.

In the end my Blog wasn’t as bad as what GoDaddy’s product made it out to be, The Search Engine Visibility product they sell actually ended up as a Fail more than my site, Yes I had some errors and I’ve fixed most. I rang their help desk and the advisor also came to the same conclusion that their product was doing something strange with my WordPress Blog.

I now use the WordPress plugin Simple Tags for my tagging needs and I also check keywords on Google’s Keyword Tool, I’ve blogged previously about Bounce Rate and that has dropped since implementing links to open in new tabs or windows, it’s sort of cheating as someone clicks on the link which they then go and look at or read and whilst doing that your own page is still open which helps lower your overall bounce rate.  I use Report Analyzer which is linked my to Google Analytics account to see what users are doing on my blog, it appears that as long as a user stays on your page for more than a minute your Bounce Rate doesn’t take a big hit.

I can’t really recommend GoDaddy’s product based on my experience, besides there is so much free information on the Internet on how to improve your SEO rankings why bother paying for it, even Google has a free guide that tells you what to do.

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