Top 10 SEO Mistakes

I haven’t done one of these posts for a while and the SEO mistakes do change over time. Some of them will be familiar but there are some new ones here as well.

1. Buying Backlinks – You’d be surprised how common this still is. It used to be the cheap and cheerful way to do SEO. Now it’s just a way to get your rankings destroyed. It may work in the short term for some sites but you can count on Google clobbering you at the next Penguin update. Which incidentally is still rolling out even though they told us it had finished rolling out.
2. No use or bad use of H1s – It’s a pretty easy thing to do and it’s good document structure as well so why wouldn’t you use them? Typically because the person who built your site is using them the wrong way. Make sure you use your keywords in them.
3. Duplication – The most common duplication we see is in page titles, meta descriptions and content itself. To avoid duplicate content make sure you use canonical tags. Regularly check Google Webmaster tools HTML suggestions to find other forms of duplication on your site.
4. No Call To Action – Not really an SEO element but it is a mistake we see a lot. What is it that you want people to do when they get to your site. Seems like a simple concept but so many sites get it wrong.
5. Magento Defaults – If you are using Magento for your ecommerce make sure your developer has not just launched with the default settings when it comes to multiple domains such as www and the root domain. This can cause major problems especially when implementing https. It’s probably worth us doing an entire blog post on this.
6. No Goal Measurement – this is really easy to do in Google analytics.

   

7. Disabling Products – this is pretty common when it comes to ecommerce sites. I did an entire show on the subject back in April. If you simply disable a product because it is out of stock you create a broken link as far as Google is concerned which is bad for users. Then when it’s back in stock you enable it Google doesn’t know and thinks it’s missing so it won’t rank it.
8. No Meta Descriptions – Once again not strictly SEO but for product pages it’s a good idea to include them as it is usually what Google will display in the search results. It’s where you get to use your sales pitch. You don’t need to worry about them for your blogs or articles though.
9. Not controlling Google – Once again this is so common I did an entire show on it . This is something is ALWAYS ignored and if you could do one thing, do this. Make sure Google is not crawling things you don’t want it to.
10. Cheap SEO – Not a good idea. Even if you are not using us, do not skimp on this or it will cost you a lot more in the long run by fixing up problems.

Have I missed any?

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.