Simple SEO Mistakes Part Two

Last week in our regular blog posting we discussed keywords and content in the first part of our common and simple SEO mistakes and this week we are going to discuss a few more starting with something that is often overlooked Analytics.

Analytics and Conversion

I would imagine that most of us have heard of Google Analytics and some of us may have even used it but one thing that people tend to overlook, especially when it comes to ecommerce SEO is that SEO shouldn’t stop at being a tool for driving massive amounts of traffic to your website. It’s more important to understand conversion and what keywords and traffic are driving this conversion, after all what’s the point of having 5000 visitors a month if none of them are buying or asking about your services and products.

Use an analytics package to see which words are bringing in the traffic, if you are doing ecommerce SEO make sure that you have ecommerce tracking and conversions enabled. Check your key phrases and compare them against others to see what is producing the results as knowing this information will help you to optimise your site and know what to focus on.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

These are still a very powerful thing when it comes to your on-page SEO, and it never ceases to amaze us how many companies out there still have the title tag of their homepage set to ‘Home’ or have the companies name as the title of every page.

Every page of your website should be unique and the title tag of these pages should be unique also, they should be descriptive and indicative of the content on the page and have the keywords that you are using to target your pages in them as well.

Best case scenario for your title tag is between 60 and 70 characters long (70 being the limit that Google displays in search results) with the optimal format being:

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

The closer to the front of the title tag a keyword you want to rank for is the better.

The Title Tag is the single most important SEO element on the page next to content and getting this wrong can be a damaging mistake and it’s not just for SEO purposes, they invariably get used in tweets and when people bookmark pages hence why they need to be descriptive and another reason they are highly important.

Although meta descriptions are not as important for your on-page SEO as they used to be (they don’t carry as much weight anymore as the algorithms have changed), they are still an important factor when it comes to the end user, and as we have discussed many times before it is them that will ultimately purchaser your product or service.

Meta Descriptions should be no longer than 160 characters and should also make use of the keywords you are using to target the page. As with the title tag they need to be unique to each page and as descriptive as you can make them, remember that your title tag will help the search engines to rank your site, your meta description is what will help to make people want to click and visit your page from the search engine listings.

We will cover some more common and simple SEO mistakes in a later post, in the meantime I hope you enjoy this one, if you are looking for some tips and tricks for your eCommerce business then why not take a look at our post on the top 35 tips for ecommerce seo. Please feel free to share and comment.