One of the tricky things about SEO is that your site’s rankings can be severely impaired by a couple small mistakes. If you have any of the following on your website it’d be in your best interest to set some time aside today to get started addressing these issues.

Default Title Tags

Default title tags can be the result of a CSS default, or it could just be a way to cut corners and save time. Regardless of how they got there, it’s important to replace poor title tags.

Bad

If the title tags of your website pages are simple descriptions like “Home”, “Services”, or “About Us” followed by your company name, you definitely want to write more descriptive title tags. Title tags play a huge role in search engine rankings, and having cookie-cutter titles really harms your site.

Worse

If your title tag is just your company name, then are you providing no useful information about the specific page, and this is even worse than having cookie-cutter descriptions.

Worst

You don’t see this too often, but it is something that you should never see. If your title is the filename of the page, then you are not only providing the users and serach engines with no useful information, but you’re actually sending the message that maybe you’re not quite ready for the web.

Redirects

No website stays the same forever, and when things change you have to set up redirects. If you don’t know if your site has a redirect, you can either ask your web designer, or use a free online tool like SEOzio.com. While this is a little more technical issue than title tags, it is a much more black and white issue.

Good: 301 Redirect

When a page is moved or renamed the best thing to do is to set up a 301 redirect to send users to the new content. This provides a seamless transfer for users and has virtually no negative effects for search engines.

Bad: Everything else

All too often when a page is moved there is a 302 redirect set up, which can cause significant ranking problems. A 302 redirect technically means “Temporally moved”, so search engines do not pass any of the value assigned to the original page to the new page.

Other alternatives, such as using a meta refresh are just as bad. Finally, never, and I mean never, just delete the page and let the page go to a 404 error. This is bad for the user experience, and can hurt your rankings as well.

Make Sure You’re Building on a Solid Foundation

If you have problems with title tags or redirects you want to fix them ASAP. Once you get those cleaned up you can get to work building links and optimizing on-page copy, but if you ignore them you won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.