Search Engine Optimization Violations
One of the best tools I have found to analyze website pages for SEO violations is the Bing Webmaster SEO Analyzer.
With approximately 15 SEO practices in place, the SEO Analyzer can scan your website pages and inform you of any SEO violations that occur on that page.
The most common SEO violations are:
- Page title length
- Not having Heading 1 styles on pages
- Not having alt descriptions on images
- Not having page descriptions
Page Titles
The length of the page title should be between 5 and 100 characters. Page titles should include relevant keywords you would like to optimize your site with.
If the title is too short, it may not provide search engines like Bing or Google with enough information to understand the relevancy of your page.
If the title is too long, we may need to shorten it in the search results and your keywords may not appear on the search results page. You should try to keep the length of the title somewhere between at least 5 characters and 100 characters.
Heading 1’s
The <h1> tag is an indicator to Bingbot and web visitors of what the body copy’s primary theme or topic is.
The <h1> tag reinforces the core keyword(s) found in the title, description, and the body copy. It is recommended that the <h1> tag includes keywords that reflect the contents of the page and that it is not longer than approximately 150 characters in length. It is recommended that every page include a Heading 1 tag if possible.
Page Descriptions
Search engine crawlers only show the first 150-160 characters of the description in the search results page, so if a description is too long, searchers may not see all of the text. If a description is too short, the search engines may add text found elsewhere on the page. Note that search engines may show a different description from the one you have authored if they feel it may be more relevant to a user’s search.
Image Alt Tags
As a general rule, search engines do not interpret the content of image files. The text provided in the img alt attribute enables the site owner to provide relevant information to the search engine and to the end user.