One of our most popular posts in this blog has been our “Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid“. This was based around the activities and actions you might implement when trying to optimise your own business website. So we thought it was time we created another similar post, however this will be more generic – looking at SEO activities you should be avoiding across the board.
1. Do not respond to any SEO offers you might receive over email: Now I’m talking specifically about the emails you get asking you to swap links or from companies telling you they can get your site 1000 new links for just £100. These are SPAM EMAILS!! They might sound like good ideas, but they’re not. Mass reciprocal link building is a waste of time and any company that will give you 1000 links for £100 is going to be giving you poor quality links that may harm your site. Also any company that promises to get you the number one spot on Google is lying. Don’t trust them!
2. Don’t wait too long to start your SEO campaign: SEO should be something that should be done before your site is even built! You need to think about navigation and site architecture when building your site – so SEO should be something you do from day one.
3. Don’t waste time submitting your site to search engines manually (or worse - pay someone to do it for you): Search engines work by sending out spiders (or bots) that crawl web pages using the hyperlink structure of the web. So as soon as your website gets a link from somewhere else, the spiders will follow that link to your site and as long as your site has been built well, they’ll crawl your pages and add them to their index. Manual search engine submission went out a long time ago!
4. Don’t make your website uncrawlable: Following on from the above point, you need to ensure the search engine spiders can find and crawl all the pages on your website. So avoid having session IDs, huge dynamic URLs, using a complicated, messy navigation menu that spiders can’t (or won’t) follow, or developing an all-Flash, all-graphic, or all-AJAX site. If you are using a robot.txt file, make sure it has been created correctly.
5. Don’t focus on hugely generic search terms: If you’re a bakers in Southampton, don’t focus your efforts on trying to rank well for the term ‘baker’. It’s too generic. Optimise for relevant, targeted keywords and you’ll have more success.
6. Don’t keyword stuff: This is so last decade!! Keyword stuffing used to work back in the mid 1990′s when search engines were naive to the cheating/scamming nature of human beings. People stuffed their sites with keywords and came out tops. But search engines aren’t that stupid anymore! If you keywords stuff, hide text (by making it size 0, making it the same colour as your background etc) you’ll likely get penalised by the major search engines.
7. Don’t have the same title tag on every page: We’ve covered this before in this post: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid but it’s an important issue so it’s worth mentioning again. Each page should have its own keyword rich, relevant title – keep it to within 70 characters. Find out more about title tags in this post: Website Title Tags
8. Don’t think that your visitors don’t want fresh new content: Just because you might not get constant feedback, or because you think you’re in a boring industry, don’t make the mistake of thinking that fresh, new, useful content isn’t important. There are always things you can write about - it helps improve the quality of your site, improves the perception of your company and is a great way of boosting your search engine position.
9. Don’t use the same anchor text in all your inbound links: The anchor text of a link is the (commonly) blue text you click on. When requesting and building links, make sure that you mix this up a bit. Use keywords rather than just your URL or company name and make sure that you vary it a bit.
10. Don’t focus on Google PageRank: This used to be a metric people used to access the quality (in Google’s view) of a web page. However, Google have stated that this is no longer something that they place relevance on. The PageRank you now see in your tool bar is often months out of date and doesn’t affect your rankings like it used to. Google have even taken it out of their Webmaster Tools.
This list could go on and on! Your additions are welcome in the comments – what mistakes have you made/seen in the past?
Thanks for the tips! I never know whether to use the page rank as a guide or not – mine recently went down by one point and I was worried that it was because Google didn’t trust my site as much as it used to. It’s good to know that they’re not really putting any focus on this anymore.
Thanks for commenting Effi. If you’ve recently had a drop in your PageRank, keep an eye on the levels of traffic coming from natural Google search. The only time you should worry is if this drops as well. But in most cases, a drop in PageRank shouldn’t really affect rankings and traffic volumes.