If you look at the different facets of SEO, you can see how the most significant issues essentially fall into categories: links, architecture, and content. If you’re a business owner, you might consider talking to an SEO company about getting links and building content. These are the sort of things that an internet marketing firm can do for you. As far as architecture goes, you might be surprised by how many sites have fundamental problems with the way their URLs were constructed. This can be problematic, especially when you look at issues of duplicate content. Google doesn’t like that, so you run the risk of being penalized if that’s happening with your site.   

How To Avoid These Problems

Maybe your site has a www and a non-www version of your URLs. If this happens, you’re going to be splitting the link value between them, which is never a good thing. There are ways to fix this. First, choose whether you want a www or non-www version. Set up a 301-redirect so that any visits to the one that you didn’t choose will get sent to the right one. In this way, link value won’t be split between the two URLs. Then, use Google Webmaster Tools, so your search result listings match your style preference. Finally, make sure that when you build links to your site, you use your preferred URL style.

The other problem that happens often is more than one homepage URL. If you have a lot of different URLs that go to your homepage, you’re going to have a lot of unnecessary duplication. With several URLs leading to the same content, you’re going to be getting negative attention from the Google algorithm. What you should do is set your main home page to one URL, then 301-redirect all the others. If for tracking purposes you need to set up different versions, use a canonical tag to show Google and other search engines which version should show up in the search results. Just make sure that when you build the links to your home page that you link to the right version.

These are problems that are fixed relatively easily, but with the duplicate content gone, your site will be all the stronger for it. Your site’s relationship with Google will be better, and people will be able to find your services and products more efficiently.