What is the most common problem to be solved when optimizing web sites?

[JordanBrown]

ON page - What is the most common problem to be solved when optimizing web sites?

[SwimsuitsDirect.com]

The easiest thing that often gets overlooked is optimizing image information like descriptions and alt text.

[David-Kley]

"What is the most common problem to be solved when optimizing web sites?"

Poorly optimized content and layout.

We often run across pages that have zero header tags, content without keywords, bad URL structures that do not include keywords, etc.

Are you wanting to know for your own website, or for a client? If it is one your personal site, why not post a link so we can see if there is any existing on page issues? I'm assuming you are asking due to having difficulty ranking?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

There can be many on-page issues but here you go for few of those..

1. Content of at least around 500 words per page, the more the better. Care should be taken its unique, highly relevant, up-to-date, useful to your visitors. If substantially similar or identical content has to go in two pages with different URLs, considering going for rel=canonical implementation to avoid duplicate content issue. See to its the keyword density (though there are no thumbrules) is around 1% in the article body. This is apart from other indexable content on the page like, page title, description tag, image alt text, image titles etc.

2. Page Title - the essence should be captures in the first 55 characters including spaces with your target term for the page towards the beginning

3. Description meta tag - should be around 150 characters including spaces. Description tag, though its not one of the parameters for ranking, it can have dramatic impact on your CTR from the SERPs.

4. The H1 tag - Only one H1 tag should be there per page with the target term in it

5. Links from within the content pointing to other internal pages with relevant anchor text.

6. Make sure your servers are fast enough with no down times to the possible extent. As you know page loading time is an official ranking factor.

7. Make sure to keep your URLs short to around 75 characters. Shorter, crisp, URLs that convey clear hierarchy to both the search engines and users tend to out-rank lengthy ones. URLs should include your keywords/phrases and hyphens to be used as word separators.

8. Easy and clear website navigation - care should be taken that no graphics or images are used for internal navigation, especially in the top navigation menu. The internal navigation should be only through text and JavaScript based navigation should be avoided by all possible means. With Flash and JavaScript off, users should be able to navigate through the website without any issues. To the possible extent, all the pages should be reachable within 2 to 3 clicks from the root folder. If this is not possible, add the deep nested pages to the Sitemap.xml file so that they can be found by the search engines without any effort.

9. Frames and Tables - avoid the usage of Frames and tables. Div tags can be used instead of tables as Divs result in faster rendering and provide better mobile experience also.

10. Cleaner code - the code on the website should be free of errors to the possible extent. A website with clean code will have an edge over others with coding errors. bbc.co.uk can be your benchmark in this regard. You can use http://validator.w3.org for the purpose.

11. Consistent and optimal performance on all device platforms -  care should be taken so that the pages load and render well on all platforms like, Desktop, Smartphones and Tablets. You can consider responsive web design here.

12. Social media sharing - all the important pages on the website should have socialsharing buttons for the users to be able to share the pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus etc.,

13. 404 error-handling mechanism - for all the non-existing or unavailable resources in the website, a proper custom error document should be in place that enables the visitor to further navigate through the website. All 404 errors should throw a HTTP header status message 404 and not any other header status message.

14. Make sure that your website does not have any orphan pages. Every page on the website should be reachable by at least one text link.

Also, please make it a routine to perform keyword research & analysis at regular intervals to come up with a list of new or trending keywords/phrases in your niche so as to add corresponding new pages to your website.

Please keep a watchful eye on the Webmaster tools account for any error like 404, 500 series, manual actions etc.

So those were few items that you can look in to for making your website perform better in the search engines.

Hope it helps my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi