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Whether you are a newcomer to the field of SEO, or have been doing this for years, chances are that you occasionally fall into one of the 12 most common mistakes that are made in the effort to gain rank in search. Based on the mistakes we’ve made in the past, and mistakes we see others making, we’ve compiled this list to help us all become better at SEO by avoiding the common pitfalls.
1 – Keyword Stuffing
It’s hard to believe people are still doing this, but it happens. When a page doesn’t rank naturally high for a keyword they will often try and stuff keywords into the page to make it rank higher. Not only does this not work, but it also makes your content fall to near worthless.
2 – Repetitive Keyword Targeting
So you’re not stuffing the keywords into your content, but are you targeting the same keyword on every page? Avoid using the same keywords over and over for multiple pages throughout your site. Focus on creating content that matches your subject matter and target audience and forget about trying to rig the search engines – jus to follow good SEO practices and let your quality content do the rest!
3 – Blocking Bots
It’s hard to rank when you are blocking the very guys who are trying to rank you! Instead of blocking off parts of your site to content that might not be 100% up to snuff, use nofollow tags for the links to alert the search engine bots that you don’t think the content is worthy.
4 – Not Using XML Sitemaps
Every search engine worth talking about uses XML sitemaps nowadays, so you need to make sure that you provide one and that it is updated with every change to your site. It’s a great way to get noticed and get ranked with little effort.
5 – Thinking Google is the Only Game in Town
So many people fall into the trap of thinking that Google is the only search engine in town. Just think about it – if you could increase your traffic from Live Search by 15% how much would that add to the bottom line? Get your site registered for the webmaster tools from the other big search engines such as Yahoo and MSN.
6 – Avoiding Google Webmaster Tools
Remember, we didn’t say ignore Google! Make sure you get registered with Google webmaster tools if for no other reason than to get some really good data about what is working and what isn’t with your site and keywords.
7 – Falling into the DoFollow Trap
Way too many sites are chasing after blogs and other sites that always follow links. Of course, we all know what happens to content that is linked like this – it becomes another link farm and your site will suffer the consequences.
8 – Submitting Articles for Links
It’s great to be known as the expert in something and have your articles linked to and features on prominent sites. It’s another thing to submit the same content to sites over and over again. The search engines devalue content that is found all over the place. Remember your best content should always be on your site – and when you do submit content to other sites chose sites that are worthy of the value your content provides.
9 – Placing too much Faith in Google’s Link Command
I can’t tell you how many people that rely on the Google link command as the authority of what is linking to and what isn’t for their site. While it’s a useful tool, it shouldn’t be thought of as more than just a tool – not the final authority.
10 – Blocking Bots from Duplicate Content
This falls in line with #3, with a twist. People are often afraid that duplicate content is the worse things they can have. While it’s true that it can cause a penalty in rankings, blocking bots is likely to do more harm than good. Consider instead using 301 redirects for such content.
11 – Splitting Content
So you have great content and instead of concentrating it on your primary domain you end up using it across multiple domains and just totally devalue the content. The days of sitting up link farms and link islands are long over. You always should focus your effort on your primary domain and avoid splitting content over multiple domains.
12 – Linking “Just Because”
Otherwise known as reciprocal linking, this practice has been showing up again after being dead for a few years. It’s when you have pages or even entire sites that do nothing but link back to other sites that have agreed to link to you. It’s bad and shouldn’t be done – period.
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Unless you’ve been living in a vacuum, no doubt you are keenly aware of the roaring popularity of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter and Tumblr. The popularity of these sites, combined with the ease of updating them, has transformed the blogosphere. Today, more people update their micro-blogging sites more than they do traditional blogs. Millions of people are linking to their status updates left on these sites and the search engines are happily crawling along looking at the links. The question for SEO firms is this: How does this change affect SEO techniques, and is it time to abandon the nofollow directive?
The nofollow directive in links has always been a safety net of sorts. You could use it to link to contact outside your pages that might come from an unknown source, and it was the accepted standard to linking to your own content so that the search engines didn’t believe you were link stuffing. Search engines pretty much adhered to nofollow directives and all was well.
Today, we face a much different environment. It all started with Wikipedia in some ways. By default, Wikipedia nofollows all outbound links on its site – in other words, the site isolates itself from the rest of the Internet. Plenty of people are linking in, but from the search engines point of view they aren’t linking out. Yet SEO professionals noticed something rather interesting about this arrangement. Wikipedia consistently ranks near the top for a lot of search queries. Was this “black hole” actually being rewarded by the search engines? Or could it be that the search engines were ignoring the nofollow tags altogether?
Before an answer was found for that question another wave of links without the nofollow directive hit through the micro-blogging sites. Since almost all of the micro-blogging sites require users to “host” their micro-blogs on their sites the #1 rule of blogging was broken – host your content on your own domain. Because of this the links to that content started pouring in. People were linking up to Twitter feeds and Tumblr posts left and right, and almost nobody was using the nofollow directive. It didn’t matter to the average user if they trusted the person or not, they were just interested in linking to the content for their own purposes.
A third scenario popped up as well, led by the Wikipedia example above – people started to nofollow all links from their sites to replicate the success Wikipedia had. So now we had three situations where nofollow was coming into play:
- To isolate sites entirely from outbound links.
- Ignoring it completely because of the popularity of sites like Twitter and Tumblr.
- Search engines choosing to ignore nofollow and following anyway.
Have you kept up? It’s a nightmare for anyone engaged in SEO to try and figure some of this out!
To throw another twist into the mix, recent tests have shown that sites that have nothing but nofollow links pointing to them are actually ranking. This gives credibility to the theory that search engines are choosing to ignore the directives.
So how can you use all these findings to make your sites better and to increase your rank? Simply put, it’s something where right now there is no clear answer. You should continue to use the nofollow directive as you have in the past for paid links and such, but when it comes to social networking sites you may want to drop it altogether. You may want to try several different versions of pages to see which ones ranks better trying a combination of nofollow directives. Questions like this make the perfect scenario for A/B testing.
If you want to get more information about Search Engine Optimization, we invite you to visit our SEO FAQ and subscribe our feed in our SEO Blog.
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Think about two department stores located in the middle of town. One is brand new, glitzy and has the “designer” name. The other has been around for years, has a modest appearance and locally owned – and perhaps not everyone has even heard of them. Yet, the modest department store is drawing in more customers and creating more sales despite the fact it isn’t the “#1 retailer”. How can this be? It’s for the same reason that being #1 in the search engine rankings doesn’t necessary spell success – you have to look at more than just where you rank, but how your traffic and segments are doing in comparison to various factors to determine how well your site is (or isn’t) doing.
So why is worrying about rank alone a wasteful exercise? Let’s start out by saying that yes, it is important to be on that first page and hopefully near the top – but let’s face it, not all of us can be #1 all the time. Here are so many factors that can affect where you rank at any given moment of the day. There may be a big news story of the day that is taking up screen real estate and affecting rankings for the keyword you are targeting. It could be a geographical problem – you are #1 in St. Louis, but #3 from Quebec. Search results vary by location as the engines try to deliver the most relevant results for the keywords and location of their customers.
It could even be the data center that is returning the results, or the new code that Google is testing out for their engine. Things that you have no control over and as a result have no consistent method to address as an issue.
A more accurate measure of how well you are doing in the rankings is to look at how much traffic your site is getting. Sure, you may be ranked 3rd but if you are getting a large volume of traffic (and hopefully converting the traffic into revenue-generating activities) then you could very well be doing better than the #1 and #2 results. This is why it is so important to implement segmenting on your website through tools such as Google Analytics so you can analyze how certain segments of your website – such as revenue generating activities – are doing. It helps eliminate the noise from the dollars!
Once you get a handle on search engine traffic and conversions, then you can start looking at merging that data with ranking data to look for correlations. Suppose you have a spike in traffic – was there a noticeable change in rank? Or was it due to non-organic methods? Correlating the two data sources help you know where the traffic is coming from and what type of traffic it is.
As you continue to develop your SEO skills and manage your web properties and clients it is important that you (and your customers) understand the difference between rankings and traffic. You can help your clients better understand how to interpret the data when you start by knowing how to analyze the data effectively.
Just remember Avis (the rental car company) and their slogan – “No. 2. So we try harder”. Then ask yourself if you need to work harder on your site, or is #2 producing the traffic and revenue that you and your clients desire?
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So how many of us hang onto Google’s every word? When we wake up in the morning and Google had made a change, however slight, how often do we run around thinking the sky is falling and the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world as we know it has come to an end?
If this sounds [...]