Top SEO team Yoast have reviewed more than 500 websites and keep finding the same problems. Take a look at these for a quick fix that will boost your website performance.
Some of the things most sites get wrong
- 404 pages
It baffles me in how many reviews this came up, so few people spend time making a proper 404 page… I’ve written about this quite extensively, this post about 404s for WordPress is probably the best / most interesting, even when you’re not on WordPress. - Subscription options
This is probably due to us reviewing a lot of WordPress sites / blogs, but we very often find that people are missing out on lots of subscribers by not having good subscribe widgets or even altogether lacking an email newsletter. - Responsive websites
If you’re serious about being on the web, whether to make money or to inform, you need to think about the different devices people will use to access your site, your content, your products. Rarely over the last few years did we find a site that had done this really well. Which is funny, especially for WordPress sites, because with good themes like a lot of the Genesis based themes around, having a responsive site doesn’t need to be expensive. - Internal Search
Internal search often left a lot to be desired on the websites we reviewed. In a way, this isn’t that surprising: WordPress internal search just plain sucks (this old articlefrom me on making it suck less is still relevant) and most other CMSes, including Magento, don’t exactly shine in that area. On the other hand: setting up a Google Custom Search Engine is not that hard… - Keyword usage and internal linking
The last thing that I find we often make remarks about is the usage of keywords. Now these remarks go in all directions, but one thing is clear: simple principles like the Cornerstone Content principle are often misunderstood. Quite a number of the sites we made remarks about in this area had the keyword they wanted to rank for in the title of over a dozen pages. Think to yourself: how would Google decide which of these pages to show as the top result? Are you making that clear? - Call to Action
Very often we find sites that do, in fact, rank rather well for certain terms, but make hardly any money from that fact. This is often true because they lack a clear call to action. Michiel’s article about the call to action on your homepage is a good example of the kind of advice we tend to give.
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