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FyberSearch is not the owner of the article below and accepts no responsibility for it's content, claims or the the websites that it links to. It was submitted to FyberSearch for publication on Search Industry Blog by it's assumed author. If you are the author and did not authorize it's publication please contact the Search Industry Blog immediately.
I read and evaluate hundreds of websites a month. Some sites I read for information, some are my own, some are blogs, messageboards and so on. The rest are from people who request a free SEO site evaluation from my company. Some are from large corporations and others are from mid-sized companies, but almost 50% of the evaluations requested are from do-it-yourselfer's. There is so much information available on SEO and SEM. Everywhere you turn there is another article on SEO. One thing I often notice is many people suffer from information overload. They try to read everything they can find and in many situations, they try everything they read. Some of that information is either outdated or ineffective. Some of these self SEO'ers simply don't use what they read effectively. I have taken some of the most common mistakes and listed will explain them for you here. Hopefully, this will help you correct any problems on your site. Keyword research: Many people have no idea that it's even necessary. I have seen website owners attempt to optimize for key terms that do not even exist. One gentleman created a new product that no one has even heard of. The only marketing he was doing was SEO and some PPC. You can't optimize for the product name only when no one has ever heard of your product. If no one has heard of it, how will they search for it? They won't. The research needs to be done to determine what keyphrases people would type to find what your product is offering or related to. Bad web design: This one really gets to me. This is one I see more than any other. People hiring a web design firm or DIYing it before fully understanding what SEO is. The way most strictly online businesses begin is by someone deciding that they want to create a website online. Then they have one built. Then they learn about how to promote it and how search engines are used. The problem there is, if their site is not SEO friendly (meaning clean urls, not in frames, not 100% Flash and other search engine indexing problems), it will hurt their ability to rank well. Many people don't find this out until after they have their site built. This can cost a new website owner a lot of money. Educated yourself. Do not rely on the web designer to tell you about SEO and what you need to know to have a SEO friendly site. Many web designers are just designers. They have no interest in what is SEO friendly or not. Do all your research before you have a site built and find a web design that can provide what you need for your site and the search engines. Hidden text: This one still amazes me. That method hasn't worked since Ebert sat next to Siskel. Why do people still try these old methods? They read old articles, blog entrys or messageboards. They think doing things unnaturally will help them in the natural listings. If you don' know this yet, you do now. It doesn't work. Repeating words too often: This one gets overlooked a lot. Let's say for example you sold tickets. Now let's say your menu is all HTML (links). Your menu may read something like this; Hockey tickets, Boxing tickets, Wrestling tickets and so on. Now if you have fifty events and you have tickets after every one, you could run into a lot of problems. Especially if you wanted to come up on the search engines on any phrase with the words tickets in it. There are a lot of other factors that would need to be considered as well, such as the length of content on the page, off site SEO, etc. If this was a typical site, it would hurt your rankings in the SERP's. This is just a small portion of problems I see. Hopefully, you can learn to avoid common SEO mistakes. Unless you are SEO savvy, it's almost always better to hire a professional if you can afford to. I know that isn't always possible. Also, try to get your information and tips from reliable sources. It will save you a lot of back tracking.
Try Joe's article submission service Read his SEO articles and listen to his podcast on SEO or read his ppersonal blog at http://www.mr-seo.com/wordpress |
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