Mistakes. We all make them, and ideally we learn from them. But even
the smallest of mistakes on your website can sometimes cause big
problems. And big problems with a website can cause lost traffic, money,
and jobs.
With that in mind, here are 5 mistakes I’ve seen often enough to
warrant a mention. I hope that you can learn from others who weren’t so
lucky:
1. Telling the search engines you don’t want them to add your website to their database or follow its links.
If the pages of your website are not in Google’s database, then
there’s no way you’ll ever receive any search engine traffic — targeted
or otherwise. Not a week goes by when I don’t see a website where
somehow the “noindex, nofollow” meta tags have been inadvertently added
to every page (or even just some pages) of the site. Most of the time,
it’s due to a WordPress setting that goes unnoticed when the website is
first being designed. If you literally can’t find any page of your site
in Google, even for a search on the name of the site or the URL, view
the source code to see if you have told Google that you don’t want them
to index your site.
I use a Chrome extension called “Nofollow,”
which highlights all links that have the nofollow attribute, and also
pops up a little window if the page is set at “noindex.” This simple
extension is why I end up spotting this so often.
2. Relying on SEO software to “optimize” your website.
Repeat after me: There is no specific number of times a keyword
phrase should be used in my content. There is no magic number of words
that my pages should have written on them. And there is no best number
of words or phrases that belong in a Title tag. And most of all: There
is no SEO software that can optimize my website (despite the claims of
their creators).
Use your common sense to optimize your site! Learn how your target
audience searches for products, services and information such as yours,
and write about it accordingly on your website. Then write to make an
emotional connection with your visitors so that they’ll convert into
happy customers.
3. Improper redirecting of old pages (or sites) to new ones via a 302-redirect instead of a 301-redirect.
Whether you’ve changed your domain name to something different or
you’ve redeveloped your website and all or most of your new URLs are
different from the old ones, it’s critical to redirect the old to the
new via 301-redirects and not 302s. A 301-redirect causes Google to
remove the old URL and also to pass the link popularity of the old URL
to the new one. But a 302, while redirecting visitors to the correct new
URL, will often still be indexed by Google. This causes duplicate
content issues and PageRank splitting problems. That is, any links to
the old URL will not pass “link juice” to the new one as long as it’s
redirected erroneously via a 302.
Check the http header status of your redirected URLs to see if they show a 301 or a 302 via the SEO Consultant’s server header checker tool.
4. Writing to your CEO instead of your customer.
When you’re entrenched in the day-to-day activities of your business,
you might forget that the words you use to describe what you do aren’t
necessarily the ones that will be used by those unfamiliar with what you
do. The people who come to your site shouldn’t need a translator to
understand exactly what you do. And you know who the worst offenders
are? Marketers! I fundamentally understand marketing at a commonsense
level, because it’s a fairly simple concept. Yet when I check out some
marketing companies’ websites, they might as well be speaking Martian.
In addition to the gobbledygook that many companies write, they also
don’t always speak to their potential customer at all. Instead, they try
to impress those customers with how great they are.
To fix these copywriting mistakes, find out the words people use to find products and services such
as yours through keyword research, and then tell your potential customers what’s in it for them, rather than how totally awesome YOU are.
5. Creating a new site on a new domain and leaving the old site up as well.
I know that it’s scary to develop a brand-new site — especially if
(for whatever reason) you must change domain names. But having 2
websites up at the same time is a recipe for disaster when it comes to
the search engines. Every time I’ve seen this done (either on purpose or
by mistake), the new website rarely gains any traction in the search
engines as long as the old site is still alive and kicking. If you’ve
spent time and money creating a kick-ass new website, don’t kill its
chances of people finding it through search engines by keeping your old
cruddy (but highly ranking) site lurking in the background.
Be sure you follow best SEO redesign practices, 301-redirect all your old URLs to the new, and — if you are changing domain names — perform a “change of address”
using your Google Webmaster Tools account. After you do these things,
your new site should do at least as well as your old site did in the
search engines. More likely than not, it will do even better!
There are probably 100 more SEO rookie mistakes that are made every
day, but I hope that these 5 — as well as the tools to help find and fix
them — provide you with a good start toward keeping your website
mistake free!
