16 Top SEO Fails

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a time consuming endeavor.  When implemented correctly, it can be an extremely effective way of driving quality traffic to your site.  Unfortunately, too many site designers and SEOs simply fail when it comes to SEO.  They merely go through the motions of SEO without fully appreciating the potential impact of every action, word or tactic.  Following are the biggest FAILS that will prevent your site from being a success.

Fail #1: Using the Wrong Keywords

Even if you didn’t do your homework from the get-go, you always have the opportunity to fix this mistake. SEO works only if you have identified the best keywords – otherwise all of your efforts will be fruitless.   In some cases, industry jargon may work, but more than likely you need to determine what words and phrases prospective customers actually use when searching for businesses similar to yours.  You may be shocked to learn exactly what keywords are searched.  How you use keywords is equally important.  Avoid keyword stuffing and use keywords strategically throughout your site so that each web page has its own set of keywords.

Fail #2: Poorly Constructed Web Page Titles

Your web page title determines how your web site is displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs).  It is critical that you know the maximum number of characters your title can be for each search engine. Your page titles are the links search engine users will click to be directed to your site.  So make sure your titles are relevant, include keywords, and are different for each web page.  Web pages, not sites, are ranked on SERPs so each web page is a new opportunity to drive traffic to your site – use each page to your advantage with proper SEO.

Fail #3: Irrelevant Web Page Descriptions

Directly below your web page title on SERPs is a description that users can read to determine if your page is in fact relevant to their search.  Don’t make the mistake of assuming your first few sentences are appropriate here.  Take the time to summarize what readers can expect to see on the page.  Optimize with keywords and try to stay within the character limit.  Since each search engine has different requirements, choose the ones that are most important to your SEO strategy and use those ones.

Fail #4: Broken Internal Links

When a search engine crawls your site, if they reach a broken link, they will probably abandon their indexing at that point.  This means that your site has not been completely indexed for SERPs.  And if a broken link exists near the front of your website, you may find that your site is not included at all on SERPs or given a PageRank.  Broken links are a problem because they interrupt user experience which is the primary focus of search engines.  There are free tools you can use to test your site on a regular basis and fix any broken links.  You should also check to make sure your photo links work properly.

Fail #5: Awkward Site Navigation

Search engines consider your site architecture during the indexing process.  If your site is confusing or seems difficult to navigate, you may find yourself lower on SERPs.  One of the best ways to test your site navigation is to have two different people go through it – one who has been using the Internet for a long time, the other a new user.  The experienced user will have a sense of how the site should flow for a user.  Most sites have a similar basic navigation structure that users have come to expect.  Your experienced user will be able to pinpoint possible logic errors that you can fix.  The newer user is more likely to focus on the general navigation experience. Find out what they got stuck on or had trouble finding. Did you forget to place a “home” button on your inner pages?  Is your site map placed in an obvious location?  What needs to be changed on your menu?  Once you address these issues, search engines should be able to easily index your site.

Fail #6: Low Quality Content

With recent Google updates, much attention has been given to on-page and off-page content.  The truth is that the quality of online content has been degrading over the past several years.  As more sites focus on SEO techniques, they have gotten away from the very real business of providing quality content to customers.  There is no SEO tactic that will ever be able to replace fresh and relevant content.  Google has reminded SEOs and site owners that quality content is their main criteria when ranking sites.  And if you have that, you still have a good chance of getting high rankings even if you do not engage in other online marketing activities.  There are many ways to provide high quality content.  You can add a blog to your site and add posts on a regular basis.  You can add video, infographics, or audio to your site.   Off-page content includes articles submitted to directories and authority sites, blog comments, and forum discussions, just to name a few.  The important thing to remember pertaining to content is to make sure it is always high quality, relevant, and never duplicated.

Fail #7: Spelling and Grammatical Errors

It’s alright if you are not a national spelling bee champion or professional grammarian.  What’s not okay is to assume that your site will prosper with grammatical or spelling errors.  We are talking about obvious and consistent mistakes.  Know what your strengths are – if writing is not one of them, you need to hire someone who can produce polished content so that you get your site the traffic you need.  You may have incredible ideas to share, and it would be a shame not to get the attention you deserve because of issues with your writing.

Fail #8: Pages Full of Images

If you truly want to optimize your site for SEO, you need to rethink those pages that have more images than content.  Even if many of the images have text your site will not be indexed sufficiently for high rankings on SERPs.  Search engines cannot “read” images so they are just ignored.  And if you do not have enough written content to balance your pages, search engines can mistakenly believe your site has little value for their customers.  In addition to adding more text content, one of the easiest ways to address the image issue is to use your image alt tags.  You can add relevant text to describe the image in context of your overall site – be sure to add keywords for indexing.

Fail #9: Too Many Ads

Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative way to make additional money.  But it really shouldn’t be the primary focus of your website.  If you have more ads than content on your site, search engines will determine your site to be of lesser importance and rank you accordingly. Placing ads on you landing page can be especially problematic.  Place ads throughout your website rather than displaying them all on the same page.  And place the ads below the primary content or on one side of the page.  The majority of your pages should have relevant content that search engines can index.

Fail #10: Insufficient Backlinks

One of the best ways to get ranked higher on SERPs is to have backlinks.  These need to be links from quality sites.  The more quality backlinks you have, the greater your chance of being ranked high on SERPs.  Additionally, backlinks affect your PageRank which is determined by an algorithm that scores the importance of site links.  In this instance, quality and quantity are equally important.  As you grow your backlinks, you begin to establish yourself as an authority site which search engines like to present to their users.  Your growth rate should be natural – if you suddenly have hundreds of links to your site, search engines may penalize your site as a spam site.  Be careful paying for backlinks as this can also trigger a penalty and cause your site to lose PageRank and drop on SERPs.

Fail #11: Invalid W3C

If your site does not have W3C validation, search engines cannot index it.  Search engines expect websites to follow website standards established by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).  Unless you are a programmer, you probably will not be able to determine if you have HTML problems.  Fortunately, there are tools you can use to validate your HTML so you at least know if you need to contact a professional to fix your coding issues.

Fail #12: Not Using Meta Tags

This may not impact SEO with every search engine but several still use meta tags for indexing.  Choose tags that describe your page content.  Don’t use too many and make sure your meta tags vary across your web pages.  If all of your meta tags are the same, you may not get every page indexed or included on SERPs.

Fail #13: Large PDF Files

Large PDF files can significantly slow down your page load time which impacts SEO.  Before uploading a PDF file, you need to “optimize it” and “reduce file size”.  These are both commands a professional PDF creator program will allow you to do.

Fail #14: Using Flash on Landing Pages

Many search engines, including Google, don’t like flash because, like images, they can’t read it.  In addition, flash slows down load time, and may not be viewed the same in different browsers.  In short, flash, especially on landing pages, can result in poor user experience which is a drawback for search engines.  For this reason, don’t expect search engines to figure out a way to “read” flash anytime in the near future.

Fail #15: Being Un-Social-Able

Whether you like it or not, social media is a vital component of any SEO strategy. If you haven’t added at least one way to share your content via social media, you are way behind the eight ball.  One of the benefits of social media is it helps you focus on providing “sharable” content.  The more your content is shared, the more backlinks you create which we have already seen is a major SEO booster.  Even if you just join one social network, you can add that button to your site immediately and become social-able overnight!

Fail #16: Not Monitoring Site Performance

Do you know where your site stands on major search engines?  Do you regularly search your keywords to see if you are gaining or losing rank on SERPs? Really, why bother with SEO if you are not going to monitor your performance?  You can get free analytics from sources like Google that help you see where your traffic is coming from, what they do once they get to your site, and how long they stay.  You need this type of information to continue to fine-tune your SEO efforts.

These are just some of the main SEO fails – there are many more!  SEO takes time to learn and you probably won’t get everything right the first time.  But as long as you continue to work on it, you will be able to drive organic traffic to your site.

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