Stoney and the crew at Pole Position Marketing created a
fictitious site called "Galaxy Quest Airlines". Instead of just going through a
checklist of things to look for, he created an interactive audience
participation experience where the audience members peruse the site and find on-page
SEO problems with it, and then Diana Adams made live edits to the site.
These are issues that are common on many sites, and
something to look out for. Some of the problems found, included:
Homepage Issues
Splash Page
No content.
Extra steps for user.
Too many dashes in url
Not user friendly.
Hope users don't forget hyphens.
Competitor could buy other domains and get type
in traffic.
Site Navigation
Drop down forms used for navigation, which is
not good for search engines because they often don't read forms.
Inconsistency with header navigation on different
pages.
File Names
Underscores in some of the file names. Minor
issue but for usability, helps to have hyphens instead.
Internal Linking
"Click here" repeatedly used for link text. It
is important to use meaningful text in the anchor text (text being linked) in
order to pass value internally throughout the site.
Links are nofollowed. This prevents the passing
of link value throughout the site.
Text isn't linked to key pages.
Broken Links throughout site. *Be careful when
using capitalization because servers are often case sensitive wit file names.
Server/Spidering Issue
Robots.txt - disallowing access to site. Important
to have proper directives in robots.txt
META ROBOTS tag is blocking spiders
(NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW).
WWW vs non-WWW version of url - Pick one to use
and have the other redirect via .htaccess.
Content
Duplicate content. There are large chunks of
text content repeated throughout the
site.
Non-unique TITLE tags - creates duplicate
content issues. Should be unique for each page.
Prominent Headlines should be in <H1>
tags.
Images
Text is all in images - Unreadable to search
engines.
Image ALT tags are missing. ALT tags can help
provide value to search engines and help viewers who have image turned off or
are using special readers for handicapped viewers.
HEAD tags
Keyword stuffing in META KEYWORDS. No need for
keywords tag. At very least keep it minimal.
Code bloat
JavaScript and CSS should be in external so
spiders won't access each time, and will cache for users. Speeds up load time
and makes easier for spiders.
Tags with no content
(<H3> </H3>).
Code Errors
One example was many links that aren't closed
which means rest of page is linked. Keep code clean.
You can validate html/xhtml if you wish.
Site Map
This
was inconsistent with the rest of site and looked more like a list of linked
keywords. Should have been like other
pages with meaningful info.
