Eric Enge posted a very smart article on the common mistakes most site owners make on their sites in a post over at the Search Engine Watch Blog where he mentions that there are “hundreds of different ways” that people can mess up their sites, and based on his/their experience from working with scores of clients, he lists the 10 most common SEO problems that they found.
Before I list the 10 mistakes, I’d just like to say that it is not only site owners that are at fault here, but web design companies/webmasters mostly. Let’s face it, most of the sites on the Web are built by web companies that claim to apply SEO techniques but fail miserably at doing so.
Site owners on the other hand are becoming more aware of SEO and want to implement SEO tactics on their sites but face a dilemma every time they make contact with their Webmasters or Web design companies. These companies are either to proud to admit they erred in effectively applying SEO or they simply feel that they’ve done their job and don’t want to make updates or changes. And if they do, they cause more harm than good.
So, to not step on toes, let me rather redirect your attention to what we should be doing on our sites. Here are the 10 common mistakes:
- Broken information architecture - sites that fail to map the nature of the information they provide into an understandable hierarchy.
- Poor site usability - Results are poor conversion rates, poor lifetime value per visitor and less attractive sites to link to.
- Mismanaged internal link juice - sites allocate link juice poorly, resulting in not enough of it going to their most important pages.
- Content getting buried over time - sites that create huge amounts of content use publishing systems that buries stuff over time.
- Bad redirects – site owners/designers defaults to using 302 redirects. Not good.
- Poor titles and headers – sites with poor keywords in page titles and headers or unrelated content to your business.
- Insufficient content - No content > no links > no traffic. Offer something unique.
- Duplicate content - a common killer, major factor in poor page rank management.
- All flash site - pretty, but not suitable for crawlers. Offer (alternative) text link navigation and/or use a technique like Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR).
- Duplicate Meta description (and keywords) on all pages - the Meta description is used as the description in SERP’s – make it descriptive and relative to content on each page.
Finally, Eric mentions that these are the most common offenders and that there are other problems as well. Perhaps you know of more common SEO mistakes? Why not discuss this over in the SEW forums.
Popularity: 47% [?]
Move aside Google; Microsoft announces a competitive service called Webmaster Portal.
According to a Live Search Weblog post the singular focus of this tool is to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters.
Microsoft is calling it “Webmaster Portal” and it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO.
It will support these scenarios:
- Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
- Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
- Statistics about your website
- Consolidation of content submission resources
- New content and community resources
The tools are not available yet and Microsoft have created a private beta program to let you get your hands on the tools sooner: to get your feedback so they can “spit-and-polish” the tools.
If you are interested in testing the new tools send an email to lswmp@microsoft.com to apply!
Popularity: 58% [?]
I discovered a little post this morning on Search Engine Roundtable about whether a robots.txt file is required for SEO?
The question was asked in a Search Engine Watch Forum, and I agree with both of the comments made at either references, a robots.txt file is not required for SEO at all, at least to a degree.
The search engines will find and crawl your site automatically and don’t require a robots.txt before they index or crawl your site. Adding a robots.txt file or not having one at all does not affect your site ranking one bit.
That is not to say the robots.txt file isn’t useful.
Firstly, should you not have a robots.txt, you’ll get many 404 errors shown in your statistics pages as search engines do look for this file to see which restrictions might be set in place for them via this file.
Secondly, the purpose of the robots.txt file is to control which pages the search engines should not crawl, which can be very useful for duplicate content and SEO purposes.
In addition, you can add crawl-delays for Yahoo to reduce the overall bandwidth the search engine is generating if visiting too frequently.
Also, if you want to specify a sitemaps location, you can.
As you can see, there are many useful uses for the robots.txt file and though it is not really required, it sure is useful.
Popularity: 63% [?]
While visiting my Site Explorer account yesterday I discovered a new tab called “Dynamic URL’s Beta”. Without hesitation I clicked through and found that Yahoo now helps site owners to dynamically rewrite URL’s from within Site Explorer.
At the moment you can only specify up to 3 dynamic parameters that you want to have rewritten and Yahoo will automatically rewrite the URL’s containing these parameters.
As the Yahoo! Search Blog suggests, you might wonder what the feature really gives you.
Utilizing the ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ feature enables:
- A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URL’s being crawled.
- Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
- More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URL’s (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
- Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
- Cleaner and easier-to-read URL’s displayed in the search results.
- Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.
Some examples for rewriting your URL’s:
1. Remove these parameters from the URLs, such as in case of session ids, you could ask to remove ’sid’ from URLs
http://example.com/store?prod=1&sid=23yadh56 ==> http://example.com/store?prod=1
http://example.com/store?prod=1&sid=2jrwe89k ==> http://example.com/store?prod=1
2. Use a default value for the parameter, for example you could set the ’src’ parameter to be ‘yhoo_srch’
http://example.com/blog?src=rssfeed ==> http://example.com/blog?src=yhoo_srch
http://example.com/blog?src=footer ==> http://example.com/blog?src=yhoo_srch
I am not sure how soon they will upgrade the Beta version and increase the number of URL’s, but i am sure it will happen sometime soon.
Popularity: 60% [?]
According to a article on News24.com, South African companies are beginning to follow their international counterparts in blocking employee access to popular social networking site Facebook.
While some experts defend the site, saying it holds huge potential as a business tool others are concerned over productivity.
In an effort to prevent people spending non-productive time on non-work related issues, companies have opted to add facebook to their list of leisure sites to be blocked. Companies like Standard Bank, Absa, Wesbank and a number of smaller companies are following this trend.
“We don’t see any business need for Absa staff to access the site,” said a ABSA spokesperson.
Facebook is the second most visited website in South Africa
With at least 170 000 users on the South African network, users say they are addicted and spend far more than 20 minutes per day interacting with their “friends” locally and globally.
Website traffic monitor www.alexa.com ranks Facebook as the second most visited website in South Africa, next to Google, and Facebook ranks South Africa in the top 10 user countries.
This was just a snapshot of the full article which can be read at News24.com
Popularity: 100% [?]
The Inside AdWords Blog just recently announced the launch of a new ad performance tool called AdWords Campaign Optimizer. This is a on-demand and automated tool that gives personalized campaign ideas on how to help you improve your AdWords account performance and increase your advertising return, in just a few minutes.
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Popularity: 65% [?]
I was just sent an email about a 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden, who has been thrust into the IT history books because she has the world’s fastest internet connection.
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Popularity: 100% [?]
Yahoo! added a Search Suggest feature to its Web search box on Yahoo.com. You are automatically given a search term suggestion based on what you are typing into the search box - as you are typing.
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Popularity: 71% [?]
I have been absent from my blog during the last two weeks and although I desperately wanted to post something, new projects and office commitments have kept me from writing something useful.
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Popularity: 81% [?]
Last month, the SMX Advanced Seattle or Search Marketing Expo gave us much to write about regarding the Expo and Search Optimization. We heard about Danny’s plans for future SMX conferences and we also heard how attendees compared SMX to SES Conferences, especially the food…
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Popularity: 79% [?]
