Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid

June 2, 2009

SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is defined by Wikipedia as: “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results”.

SEO is something that can be done by yourself – up to a point. The major search engines are constantly changing and updating, and as a result the methods employed to boost website rank in those search engines also change and update. At SMEketing we can offer the majority of small business owners the SEO service they need to boost their website rankings.

However, if SEO is something you choose to manage in-house, here are a few of the most common mistakes that are made which can be easily fixed or avoided altogether.

1. Making your site uncrawalable – The most common mistake is developing a website that is completelyFlash based. Search engines need to be able to read text on your site to know what it is you do. Other ways to make it difficult for the engines to index your site’s pages include building an all-AJAX site, having an incorrect robots.txt file or having session IDs.
2. Poor design & usability – This can make it much more difficult to get inbound links from other sites. It may also reduce your conversion rates and if your site architecture is full of broken links it makes it very difficult for users and search engines to read.
3. Poor URL structure – Dynamic URLs in a database driven site are not very search-engine friendly and are confusing for users. By manually changing your URL structure you make it easier for the search engines to index deep pages and you may get more quality long tail traffic from searchers.
4. Submitting your site’s URL to the search engines – This is a waste of time. Do not ever pay anyone for a search engine submission service. The search engines will find your site, either without assistance.
5. 302 redirect rather than 301 – A 302 tells the search engine robot that the page has been moved temporarilyto a new location, while a 301 redirect indicates a permanent move. With a 302 redirect, you will lose all the value from the links directed to the old page.
6. Duplicate content – Only post original content on your site! Rewrite pages if they sound too similar. It does not pay to be lazy on this point!!!
7. Same meta description on each page – If you are using the same words to describe each page, you are both misrepresenting your web pages and duplicating content on your site. Each meta description should be unique and relevant to the content on that page.
8. Overstuffing keywords into content / meta tags / image alt tags – Do not spam your own website by overstuffing keywords, especially into your web copy as it becomes unreadable and it is not user friendly. This is a very ‘black hat’ SEO technique, and you may find your site banned from Google if you employ this strategy.
9. Mismanaging links – Ensure that keywords are allocated in a logical manner across your site when developing your link building strategy.
10. Do not target overambitious general keywords –  ‘finance’, ‘lawyer’ etc – these types of phrases are too general for most websites to ever rank for on the first page of the search engines. There are only 10 positions; please be realistic! There are a lot of big players in the marketplace – don’t try to compete with B&Q for the search term DIY – you will waste a lot of time and money, and you will never win! Instead focus on the long tail searches.

So I hope this has given you an indication of some of the strategies and techniques you should avoid. Google and the other search engines are very clever beasts – don’t try to outsmart them. If you think that the SEO strategy you’ve been advised to employ sounds a little bit like cheating, then it’s probably something you should avoid!

If you have any questions regarding SEO - leave a comment, or send us an email at info@SMEketing.com,  one of our SMEketers will be gladly you help you out!

Filed under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Tags: (SEO), search engine optimisation, SEO Mistakes, Small Business Marketing, website marketing, Website ranking