10 most common SEO mistakes when optimizing your site

10 most common SEO mistakes

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.

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