Top 10 SEO Mistakes

January 2nd, 2008 - Alex McArthur, VP of Search Optimization

These days, it seems everybody is an SEO expert attempting to implement their own brand of SEO. And yet we see time and time again as companies implement their SEO strategies to exiguous results.

While there is no dishonor in attempting in-house SEO, it can cause a great deal of harm if one is not careful. At the least, you won’t get sufficient results from your efforts. At the worst you can destroy your company’s reputation.

Following, I cover the 10 most common and most significant SEO mistakes that I see on a daily basis.

1. Trying to Rank for Keywords That You Really Shouldn’t
   A small niche shoe website shouldn’t target “shoes” or “fashion”. There is simply far too many websites, many of them very well established, that you must beat out for such a commonly used word. “[Niche] + shoes” or “[area] + shoes” or “[style] + shoes” is a far better strategy, and a much more realistic goal.
2. Not Taking Full Advantage of the Title Tag
   The title tag is the most important place to be putting keywords. It’s the title of your document, and should therefore reflect what the document is about. Too many companies choose instead to use a generic title, such as their company name, for every webpage.

   Just as harmful, if a webpage is not about the keyword you’re targeting, then you should not use the keyword in your title. Doing so will result in your webpage not ranking as well as it should.

   Be sure to use your target keywords in your title, always putting the most important keywords first, only repeating keywords if natural, and using every keyword in your title within the webpage’s content. Any information that doesn’t help you rank, such as your company name, should be put at the end.

3. Not Using the “nofollow” Attribute to Your Advantage
   Some companies don’t use “nofollow” at all, while others use it on every link. In both cases, you are making poor use of the nofollow attribute. The nofollow attribute of an anchor tag is used as a way to meter out “link juice” – the value given to a link. By using nofollow on any given link, you are giving it less juice, thereby creating more juice for other links.
4. Using “nofollow” on the Wrong Links
   Remember from the previous point that nofollow is used to meter out the value of your links. Links that are insignificant search wise – such as your site map, user agreement, privacy policy, and so forth – are good pages to use the nofollow attribute when pointing to. This creates more juice for your more important webpages.
5. Not Optimizing the Landing Page
   So you’ve done everything else to get ranked and are now getting lots of traffic. If the landing page isn’t optimized to convert, then all that great traffic will be wasted.
6. Misuse of Flash
   Search engines have absolutely no way of indexing Flash content. Websites that use Flash for a majority of their content are missing out on the major benefits of SEO. Some sites will even use Flash to display large amounts of text, all of which remains unseen by the search engines. Flash should be used sparingly, and should never be used if it’s possible to use plain text.

   If you must use Flash, consider creating a separate page that contains text which is indexable by the search engines.

7. Keyword Stuffing / Hidden Text
   I know this gets get talked about a lot and many think no one does it anymore. You’re wrong… it happens all the time.

   Keyword stuffing is the practice of overusing a keyword or several keywords to the point that your content doesn’t make sense because it is unnatural. Hiding text is making text invisible to users by making the font color the same color as the back ground. This allows a webpage to be stuffed with keywords without making it appear unnatural to the user.

   However, the search engines are able to easily spot keyword stuffing and hiding tactics and will penalize you for it. Plain and simple: don’t do it! It will only harm you in the long run.

8. Not Targeting Keywords That Actual Shoppers Use
   Sure it’s easy to rank for the keyword phrase “guacamole colored orangutan statuette dancing in a corn maze,” but nobody will ever search for that. On the other hand, getting ranked for “guacamole” might get you a lot more traffic, but no conversions (unless that’s what you’re actually selling).

   Do your research and find keywords that will provide you with enough traffic to make your efforts worthwhile, will bring customers that convert, and are realistically obtainable. As noted in point #1, ranking for “orangutan” might be unreachable, whereas “orangutan statue” or “dancing orangutan” might serve you better.

9. Misuse of JavaScript
   A lot of JavaScript is client side, meaning it runs after the browser loads the page. This means that search engines only see the JavaScript code (or the call to it), not the results of it. If you are hiding links or other text within JavaScript code, then the search engines won’t see it, nor will they follow the links.

   To solve this problem use server-side scripts, such as PHP, that allow search engines to see the output of the script rather than just the call to the script itself. If you must use JavaScript, place code inline anytime you are creating links rather than making a call to the code. This allows a search engine spider to see the link location and follow it.

10. Bad Link Building Campaigns
    Building up inbound links is a time consuming task. If you’re going to do it, make sure that you are chasing after quality links that will build up your website’s reputation.

There are plenty of ways to create a lot of inbound links without adding any value. Don’t waste your time accomplishing nothing for your website.

Have something to add? Feel free to comment on my post.

Posted in Online Marketing, SEO Marketing | No Comments »

Content Is King… Or Is It?

November 21st, 2007 - Chris Finken, Chief Information Officer

As you get ready for the holidays and a nice four-day weekend, here’s a little something for you to digest, uh, while you’re digesting.

From the beginning of time (well, the beginning of the World Wide Web anyway), content has been declared king by SEO’s everywhere.

In the beginning of the “Content is King” movement, content development was rather crude. Throw in lots and lots of keywords whether related to your site or not, make sure you repeat every possible keyword more than everybody else, and you got ranking in the search engines.

For those that remember the dark days of search, you’ll remember that adult sites excelled at this. Search for any popular term, whether it be “cool music”, “pet adoptions”, or “shoes that make me jump higher and run faster than the other guys on my basketball team”, and about half of the top 10 results seemed to always be adult sites.

Good content becomes king

Fortunately for all of us, search engines have improved since those days. But more than the search engines changed. Webmasters began to realize that there’s more to making a sale than getting a good ranking in the search engines. So the smart ones switched strategy from writing a page of keywords crammed together to create a nonsensical webpage to writing “good” content.

Webmasters that were out to actually make money with their websites realized that their content needed to cater to their target visitor. Have a site that sells camping equipment? Maybe it would be a good idea to write about tents, hiking boots, and great places to go camping.

Sure you might not get as many visitors, but funny things start to happen when your site visitors are actually interested in what’s on your site. Your bounce rate (the number of people who leave immediately after visiting) will go way down and your conversion rate will go up. And if you do things just right, your overall sales go up as well.

Content is king?

So content is king, right? Well… no.

Content is a vitally important part of your online marketing. However, I submit that it is not king. Music is vitally important to the functioning of a dance club, but I wouldn’t say it’s the king. What is king in a dance club? How about the dancers who come for the experience?

Just like it’s the people that make the dance club worth going to, community on the Web has quickly been taking over as the king of online marketing.

Online communities have been around a long time, since pre-World Wide Web days. But there has been a huge boom over the last few years with the increasing establishment of social networking sites. This pattern confirms that people online want to spend time together. It is becoming increasingly important as each day passes for you to bring together the community of visitors that visit your site, thereby giving them a reason to continue returning to your site.

Building your very own community

So what can you do to bring together a community? To get started quickly and easily, give these a shot:

• Start a blog — Blog-o’-philes have been preaching this since the turn of the century. Two big things happen with a blog. First, you create fresh new content on a regular basis. Second, the community that comes together and meets at your blog also creates content. Content might not be king, but it is just as vital as the music at a dance club. A community is formed because of the content, but they stay because of the community.
• Implement a discussion board — Perhaps the oldest online get-together. Discussion boards have been around since long before the World Wide Web came to be. However, the WWW has allowed for major improvements on the classic discussion board. Set one up and let your community talk to each other.
• Allow user reviews of products — Studies show that consumers trust other consumers more than anything a retailer or manufacturer can say. Reviews from consumers will be the most powerful marketing content you will ever be able to put on your website.

These three items are about letting people interact with you and with each other. It makes your site a place where people can come together, talk about common interests, exchange stories, and discuss their experiences with camping equipment — or whatever it is you sell.

The content will bring the community, which will create more content, which will build your community.

Posted in SEO Marketing, Content Creation | 1 Comment »