If you website is not ranking or has dropped down the rankings, have a look at this guide to some of the common mistakes that might be costing you rankings and consequently sales. Making sure you look out for these items will help the SEO of your site.

Keywords

Are you using keywords throughout your site? Are these keywords included in both the meta tags and content throughout your site? Making sure there is a relevant level of content matching your keywords (just an optimised homepage) will help you rank for them, it's no good having "speaker system" as a keyword if your site is about Kites! Conversely, if you are using your keywords too many times that can also hurt your SEO. It's OK to mention Kites a few times but if the references to Kites are every other word on a page then you will be penalised. Search Engines look for good readable content, and they look at the content a visitor to the site can see - so if your copy doesn't read well this will have an effect on your rankings. Additionally don't hide keyword related content in your page (e.g. white text on a white background) as you will be penalised for this too.

Code

When building a website it's great to use some funky Java Script to make the site perform as you want it to, such as with drop down menus. However make sure the JavaScript content on the site is not all in the pages of your site. The SEO effectiveness of your site will be greatly impacted if Search Engine Crawlers have to trawl through reams of JavaScript code to get to the actual website content. JavaScript can be easily loaded into your site via a link in your template.

URLs/Addresses and Navigation

I recently posted about the importance of navigation but it's important enough to mention again here - don't bury good quality keyword rich pages so deep into your navigation neither visitors nor search engines can find it!

With many cart or CMS driven websites it is easily to suddenly find some of the content on your site is available using more than one URL - duplicate content, different address. When the Search engines crawl your site they look out for duplicate content - which can harm you. Look at the URL structure of your site and make sure you can't access the Trick kite page on 4 different URLs, or you may find duplicate listings in the search engines, and may face penalties for spamming a search engine with the same content on multiple pages.

Remembering these three points when working on your website can improve the chances of your site being well ranked on search engines. If you are working with an SEO company insure they are advising you about these items too.