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.

On one such bonding session, I decided to “stumble” for the duration of “Ellen” and half of “Opera”. Hey, did you see the one where they found all these guys in Lowe’s and gave them complete makeovers? Amazing… (NOT!)

Anyway… Here are some interesting stumbles I came across. I edited out all the bad ones, or at least the ones I didn’t like. Some of the sites I listed here are creative and some are not. Most are at least entertaining or informative. If nothing else, it will illustrate my blue collar interests…

Great stumbles

Online Converter – Converts any type if measurement into something else. Very useful

14Brilliant Minimalist Ads

The most brilliant outdoor campaign ever

Fonts Used In Logos of Popular Websites

A Gazillion Resources For Web Design

40 Free High Quality Hand-drawn Fonts

Daughter dating application – Very funny

Web design tips

Norman Rockwell’s Photo Realism

Slide Clock (total waste of time) (get it…? )

17 Guerrilla Marketing Ideas for Your Website

Five Minute Upgrade – Making Your Design Pop

Ten best free applications that you probably didn’t know about

Quotes by Winston Churchill

TOP 100 funniest one-liners on the internet!

70 Excellent Logo Design Tutorials and Resources

David’s comprehensive motorcycle web index

Web designers heaven (links for web designers)

Web development resources

If you’re into motorcycles, ya gotta watch this guy ride…

Excuse form (funny / useful)

49 ways to build your brand using online marketing

Welcome to CSS Basics

Amazing photography Portfolio! )

So there you have it, one night’s stumbles, at least the good one, and Mama’s still happy!

If you have any good sites to add to the list, just leave them as comments!

While it is still important to use develop a good keyword list, create unique content, and properly optimize meta information there is a much larger focus on building back links. Back links are any site that links to your site from their site.

Why are back links so important?

While this may not seem obvious to the casual search engine user the logic is actually very simple. It’s impossible to quickly build hundreds of quality back links to your site. While anyone can optimize their meta tags, title tags, or even body copy there is no quick way to get links from other sites to yours. Of course there are a lot of spam techniques  (spamming blogs, reciprocal link building, bogus comments on guest books) search engines are constantly developing algorithms to catch these black hat techniques and If caught – you could face heavily penalization or evening being completely banned from search engine results.

How can you build back links without being banned?

This is the  $20,000 question and what separates one SEO company from the next. Building back links is by far the most difficult task for any site to undertake that is attempting to increase traffic and search engine rankings. Below I will touch on the easiest natural way to increase your site’s back links naturally in your spare time.

Directories: The first thing a new site should do to increase back links is find directories it should be listed in and submit their site. I typically find these sites in two stages – Geo-targeted and industry specific.

Types of directories – And how to find them:

Geo-Targeted Directories – These are geo-specific directories that list businesses in a specific area and are very easy to find. You can do a quick in Google for your city and the phrase “business directory” or “business listings” .

Example search queries:

Pittsburgh Business Directory

Pennsylvania Business Listings

Having trouble finding geo-targeted directories? Here is a free Pittsburgh directory you can get listed in at no cost:

http://pittsburghpromotion.com/

Industry Specific Directories – These are directories that are meant to list businesses in a specific industry not by location. Many of these directories are used to give users an idea of all the companies in their industry which can help not only back links but may refer some quality traffic as well. To find these directories all you need to do is search your industry and the words “directory” or resource list.

Example search queries:

Web Design Directory

Software Developer Resource List

Having trouble finding industry specific targeted directories? Here is a free Pittsburgh directory you can get listed in at no cost:

http://www.dmoz.org

Note: Never pay to be listed in ANY directory– if a site is trying to charge to be listed stay far away. Only submit to free directories that want to link to you because they feel it’s a value to their visitors not for profit…

While this is just one way to naturally build back links there are literally dozens of techniques you can use to increase back links ethically. Do you want to find out how many back links your site has? You can use a free SEO analysis tool developed by Eyeflow Internet Marketing that will tell you how many back links your site has coming in as well as 11 other key factors that search engines look at.

If you have any questions please feel free to post in the comments and I will try my best to answer in a timely fashion.

The article was written by Phil Laboon CEO of Eyeflow Internet Marketing. A Pittsburgh based search engine optimization company.