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Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

12 November 2009

, Author - Allan Kent

Our Guide to Common Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Mistakes

  1. Not doing SEO!
    If you do the minimum level of SEO, you might, with luck stay where you are in terms of your market position. Do nothing at all and it’s practically guaranteed that you’ll move backwards and lose business opportunities, because your competitors will be.
  2. Not defining what you want the SEO project to achieve
    It is important to determine who you want to visit your site, what they might use as search terms and what you want them to do once there.
  3. Failing to coordinate SEO efforts with those of the Sales, Marketing and PR departments
    Getting visitors to the site is one thing, engaging them and converting them into qualified prospects or customers is another. Content on the site must be structured to achieve this. Good SEO without good content and effective visual design will be counter productive as once a bad first impression has been made, why would they ever come back? In addition, new content added by each department must be incorporated into the ongoing SEO strategy.
  4. Narrow focus
    Too much SEO focus is on the search listing position. However, if the structure of the listing is poor and searchers fail to click through what is its value?  Also too much SEO priority is placed on getting visitors to land on particular pages. EVERY page should be considered a potential landing page. The wider the net is cast, the better the chance of landing the fish.
  5. Failure to monitor and act upon results
    SEO work often brings up strange surprises. Search terms that would be expected to work may not in fact  perform, whilst others expected to be minimally effective bring in the best qualified, most likely to act visitors. Without constant testing and tuning SEO will never be truly optimised.
  6. Behavioural Analysis
    Some visitors will enter the site and leave immediately. This is called bouncing and means that the visitor either was not the required target or much worse, was, but didn’t find what they were looking for, or weren’t convinced your site was what they were looking for. You need to examine the entry page and identify what might be causing the bounces.
  7. Poor Content Management Systems (CMS)
    Points 4, 5 and 6 above highlight the need to have flexibility in managing the site content. A poor CMS will inhibit on this and make effective SEO difficult to achieve. If you have no CMS and the website is controlled by the IT department the problem is probably exasperated - a techie’s interest is in delivering a technical solution, not so much in ensuring the content is SEO friendly.
  8. Poor Site Navigation
    If the search term someone uses is “Baseball cap” ensure that one of the first things that person sees on entry onto your site is either the words baseball cap or a picture of one. Once on the site, wherever they have come in, make sure they can quickly and easily navigate around the rest of the site. Structure it to encourage them to explore. Link related products to make navigation easier. A generic term for this type of effective navigation is Persuasion architecture and a good website should have been built with this incorporated. When managing your own site, be sure to keep to the persuasion architecture put in place – do not deviate too far from it.
  9. Ineffective homepage
    Too many companies seem to have a fascination with creating a visual impact with their home page, at the expense of optimising it for SEO and at the expense of telling visitors on first landing that they have indeed come to the right place to meet their needs.
  10. Over emphasis on the home page
    Conversely, some companies put all their efforts into their home page and neglect the other pages of their site which should also be optimised and serve as landing/entry pages.

Linda Coles

12:09 p.m. Thursday, 29 October 2009

Some good basic points, and in particular point 6, behaviour analysis. If your bounce rate is over 40%, that tells you that 60% of your visitors have balked and clicked away. You need to find out why. Until you know the answer to that question, don't waste your money on Google Adwords etc trying to get more traffic to your site. Get the basics right first, then look at the rest. Linda http://www.bluebanana.co.nz

Terry - Wellington

10:53 a.m. Friday, 11 December 2009

I always think that this point is relative to industry. My brother is a lawyer and has paid heaps to an SEO company to get him at the top of Google, but his website never stays on the first page for very long as another company bumps him out of the way. However the company I work for sells parts for pools. We don't have to pay much for our search engine optimisation and are always at the top of the first page. My bro and I have discussed this at great length and have come to the conclusion that it must depend on whether the company is a niche company or not as to whether they will achieve good rankings in Google etc.

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