SEO tip #2: Four common issues that can make SEO even harder

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

Updated 6 years ago

4 major and quite common issues that can make SEO even harderThere are 4 major and quite common issues that can make SEO even harder and more difficult than it is.

• Crawling and indexing problems

There are many different web elements, technical solutions or coding practices that can prevent spiders from crawling, “translating” and indexing your website. Images, videos, frames, Flash animations, Javascript snippets, broken links or poor link structures, password protected pages or directories, online forms, duplicate pages, missing or corrupted sitemaps, robot.txt errors, audio files, plugins, dynamic parameters, wrong redirects, hosting issues etc. Unfortunately, the list is quite long and every single element or piece of content which cannot be seen, read, interpreted or followed by crawlers is a genuine risk factor that will harm your visibility in the search engines.

The good news: these problems can be easily avoided or solved using free spider simulators, sitemap generators, link checkers, etc.

• Different and constantly changing algorithms

As you may have seen, different search engines give different results for the very same search query or search string. Each search engine has its own – quite different – algorithm. These algorithms are based on more or less identical ranking factors, but they are weighted differently. In other words, each algorithm can – and probably will – assign a completely different weight or value to the very same ranking factor.

More than that, these algorithms are constantly refined in order to provide better, more relevant and more popular results. While most of these changes are minor, occasionally search engines may roll out major algorithmic updates causing fundamental changes and dramatic shifts in the whole SEO industry. When Google launched the Panda update in February 2011, thousands of “shady” websites disappeared from the radar overnight. The Panda update – aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality” sites – reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12% of all search results!

The bottom line: in the world of search, change is constant and you have no other choice but to evolve together with the search engines.

• The competitive nature of search engines

I won’t lie to you … There’s a cutthroat competition! The average search results page contains only ten positions and the first three positions will receive much more traffic than other results down the page. With so much exposure and attention going to so few listings you need to achieve more than just being the best of the rest … And obviously, you won’t become the best by being like the rest!

The good news: you don’t need millions of hits to capture your customer’s attention. The key is to know and to understand your target audience. If you can create valuable content in order to provide a relevant answer to a given question or a reliable solution to a specific problem, you have already won. All you have to do, is to find a few well-targeted keywords that can generate at least 10,000 searches per month. That’s a considerable amount of traffic and more importantly, it means less competition. Optimize efficiently the given web page using those keywords and believe me, sooner or later you’ll be there on the first page of the search results.

• Problems matching queries to content

Nowadays the search engines are incredibly smart, but they are still just … machines. They are extremely efficient robots performing tasks that are defined by humans. The problem: they are trying to answer a question phrased in a certain way by a given person (the person who is performing the search) using instructions which have been defined by other people (developers) and querying databases that have been created using a mind-blowing amount of data provided by several other people (website owners, SEO experts, etc).

To put it simply: the search engines are trying to provide the most relevant answer to a given question, but any question can be phrased in many different ways and even the slightest difference will produce a completely different search results page. Every single synonym, uncommon term (for example, blood glucose instead of blood sugar), grammatical error, language-subtlety (for example, flavour instead of flavor), singular or plural form, etc can work against you … or in your favor.

The good news: everybody is affected. The golden rule: check what people are searching for, and try to use as many exact matches as you can in your content.