SEO 101 Common Mistakes

For all the “SEO isn’t rocket science” crap you get from certain quarters it’s funny to see that companies from huge concerns down to one-man bands continue to commit the same errors they were making 10 years ago. If you’re an SEO, you could easily add to this list yourself (and I’ll have to thank the whole SEO team for chipping in about 63 ideas to bring this list to a nice round number!) If you’re a web designer who thinks that “good CSS = SEO”, a writer who thinks that “good content = SEO” or a developer who just thinks “SEO = bullshit” then here are a few pitfalls to bear in mind if you’re considering using SEO as a way to bring your products to market.

General Strategy

SEO isn’t just a discipline that exists outside the goals of your business. It should complement and be informed by wider business smarts.

1. Treating onsite SEO as a ‘one-off’ project without a plan to regularly review the site – especially if your site has a high product or content rollover, or has big seasonal changes to push new messages and offers
2. Changing horses mid-stream – revisiting keyword lists month by month in response to internal politics
3. Not consulting existing Analytics data to identify best performing keywords
4. Targeting all markets simultaneously
5. Forgetting about Bing and Yahoo, where rankings and traffic can be easier to find in the short term
6. Failing to understand (or convey to a client) that an SEO campaign is a long term strategy and results will not necessarily be evident in the first weeks or even months in competitive markets
7. Failing to utilize universal search options for increased SERPS visibility eg images, news, blog search, product feeds etc
8. Failing to work out initially if you can get a ROI from a sector you are targeting (profit margins, keyword volume etc)
9. Putting SEO in a silo outside core business objectives
10. Failing to include SEO input during the building of an online business plan and creating a site development spec.

Market Research

11. Concentrating on trying to concentrate on acquiring the ‘same’ links as your competition
12. Looking solely at offline competitors
13. Not tracking industry news and events for new, fresh content ideas
14. Identifying ‘competitors’ purely based on results for broad, vanity keywords
15. Not using tools like Google Insight or paying for data from the likes Hitwise to identify seasonal trends
16. Not using the valuable data available from a concurrent PPC campaign to monitor converting keywords
17. Being unprepared to deal with social media
18. Failing to deal with negative feedback and reviews online
19. Failure to do your own market research through reviewing interaction with your site through Analytics, click tracking, customer surveys etc
20. Failing to have any form of conversion tracking software on the site to see what keywords are the ones that you have to go after

Keywords

21. Focussing on a small number of high volume ‘vanity’ terms rather than a deeper and better-converting long tail
22. Allowing keyword choices on the basis of “the MD checks this every day”
23. Chasing unrealistic keywords for your budget
24. Choosing keywords from internal industry-speak rather than consumer-led terms with actual traffic
25. Deploying brand / company name as part of a tedious “Company.co.uk – About” page title formula
26. Setting too many keywords to dilute linkbuilding and content efforts
27. Believing the numbers for likely traffic
28. Using the “other users found this page by..” method of including misspellings and synonyms
29. Forgetting that 25% of all searches have never been seen before and that search queries are typically much longer than single words
30. Not reviewing keyword choices to understand where your site is failing to convert visitors and why

Content

31. Copying content from other sites – potentially tripping penalties
32. Stuffing content with unnatural frequencies of keywords
33. Keyword “wishlists” in page titles (“UK SEO – SEO in the UK – UK SEO Agency from a UK SEO” etc)
34. Duplicated meta descriptions, which encourage Google to create their own snippets which can be nonsensical and harm clickthrough rates
35. Deploying content in images and Flash files
36. Creating content that has no value to human readers and fails to back up your market messages
37. Syndicating content to higher authority sites which are likely to be indexed before your own site and thus become canonical
38. Placing a large block of keyword-stuffed “seo content” a mouse scroll below the footer on the home page
39. Outsourcing content writing to the cheapest provider that you can find… you get what you pay for
40. Putting text within images rather than using background images under HTML text content

Links

41. Building links from a narrow range of IP addresses
42. Demanding link volume rather than looking at quality
43. Using more than one company to build links without co-ordination between their goals
44. Buying blogroll links from sites with dozens of unrelated, anchor text links to companies in completely different markets
45. Using toolbar PageRank to determine the value of a link in isolation, without considering the content of the page, quality of the domain etc
46. Not re-checking link equity from established links to make sure good links haven’t gone bad
47. Relying on a small number of sources for links that could be nofollowed/deleted/removed by policy at any time
48. Over building links on a small set of anchor text
49. Not creating links to sites and pages that already link to you naturally
50. Believing that linking to the search engines or an SEO company will deliver you any benefit

Watch your URLs

51. Not redirecting URLs to a canonical domain – leading to huge duplicate content issues
52. Leaving the non-www version and the www live simultaneously
53. Not sending correct 404 HTTP responses for broken pages
54. Using long strings of variables in URLs rather than short, static URLs with a proper file extension
55. Not using the correct 301 response for old content that has moved to a new URL
56. Using links for territories and currencies that create duplicates of your content in all but minor ways
57. Using ‘unfriendly’ characters in URLs, such as underscores instead of hypens
58. Allowing the indexing of  URLS with session id variables
59. Not using keywords within URL structures over numbers and internal shorthand
60. Having a directory structure that includes terms like ‘seo’

Channelling your Equity

61. Deploying sitewide links to low-value pages such as “categories” with 1 product in them
62. Linking every page to every other through an over-prescriptive menu and diluting equity spread to non-critical content
63. Leaking equity to external sites by not deploying the rel=nofollow attribute
64. Using ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ as default choices for internal links, rather than more descriptive phrases containing keywords where appropriate
65. Not using the homepage to channel power to the most important market sectors you’re targeting
66. Not using other properties you own (parent company websites, partners etc) to direct keyword equity to your target site
67. Using internal nofollows to try to sculpt PageRank
68. Failing to protect your site from exploits – everything from basic keyword spam in blog comments to sophisticated hacks
69. Using XML sitemaps to mask poor internal link structure
70. Not understanding the importance of ‘first link first’

Code

71. Deploying lots of inline Javascript and CSS and increasing the site’s download time
72. Keeping CSS and Javascript files on the same domain, reducing threading and increasing load times
73. Leaving dozens or hundreds of ‘keywords’ in the meta keyword
74. Having page titles that deploy “keyword wish lists”
75. Using navigation that can only be accessed through Javascript
76. Not considering the use of AJAX to bring in content and links to keep load times low and control equity spread without compromising user experience
77. Serving unoptimised images with large file sizes
78. Failing to label images with relevant alt attributes containing keywords as appropriate
79. Serving different pages to spiders and human visitors through cloaking without an obviously justifiable reason such as personalisation
80. Denying access to spiders through Robots.txt

Relationships

81. Not keeping the SEO company in the loop with changes to the company’s wider strategy
82. Allowing web developers to build/change things on the site willy-nilly without informing and consulting with SEO
83. Changing contact points frequently so that messages and learning get lost
84. Not introducing SEO agencies to other parties like offline marketing companies, PR agencies etc. This misses massive opportunities for content synergy and pooling of ideas.
85. Not responding to requests for information and content
86. Not ensuring that SEO recommendations are implemented as fully as possible
87. Blaming SEO partners for falling traffic without first seeing if there are wider market reasons such as seasonality that could be playing a part
88. Enacting SEO recommendations from other third parties without consulting with an existing SEO partner
89. Being unwilling to gain a small understanding of HTML / CSS
90. Not paying your SEO company!

The First Rule of SEO Club is…. “Don’t Talk About SEO Club”

91. Leaving “clues” in source code like <!– This content for SEO //–>
92. Using obvious file names and document structure. http://www.yoursite.com/styles/seo.css is going to attraction attention and all that “text-indent:-100em” stuff is going to highlight your hidden content pretty much off the bat.
93. Having dozens of obvious keyword landing pages linked from sitewides
94. Advertising the fact that you belong to a link exchange program by carrying banners that promote such schemes
95. Asking for advice about SEO issues on public forums without consulting your SEO company first
96. Leaving link requests in blog comments
97. Creating easily identifiable networks with common IP addresses, templates and outlink profiles that have an obvious relationship with your target site
98. Making sloppy link requests to bloggers who are likely to out you (hint: read their back catalogue!)
99. Using automated tools to check rankings on too big a scale
100. Using the same link sources for different target sites again and again

And finally….

101. Don’t believe everything you read on SEO blogs 😉