Be sure to link to social networks from social icons!

At first glance that headline probably seems so obvious as to be pointless.

But I would say around 50% of all the sites I’m asked to SEO have social icons, that link to nothing.

Including a swathe of social information is really useful for search engine optimisation – SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum, there’s a quid pro quo relationship with social networks too.

But icons that link to nothing just look bad. And this mistake is really common, lots of WordPress themes come with fields to help you easily add social networks – but that can also make the easy to overlook.

It’s mightily common to see site’s where the developer just stuck a hash (#) in the social fields, then neglected forgot to add the proper profile URLs in.

Always double check everything before launching a site: the links, the permalinks, image optimisation and SEO setup.

Sure the most obvious thing is how the website looks and what it says, but in many ways it’s the smaller things that really determine how successful a website will be.