There’s a lot more than five but I’ve covered the main ones which we see here at SearchQuest on a regular basis with new clients who’s sites have previously been “SEOd”. And the bad thing is, they keep coming up again and again.
The SEO world are starting to do a great job at outing these failures and we think it’s great to see bad SEO so wilfully publicised. It is the firm responsibility of the good SEO agencies out there to educate their clients and their staff on what the best approach is to achieving success on-line. If you educate your clients (and the potential ones) then that client will stick around a lot longer, trust us!
Duplication and Same Site Competition
Duplicate on page content is the biggest rookie error but it’s not just restricted to on page content. Title tags, descriptions and keyword meta tags can all suffer from duplication. If you duplicate these you’re basically competing pages on your website against themselves and wasting opportunities to target new keywords. If you have two pages which seem to be targeting similar keywords then make sure their long tail variations are different at the very least.
If you have issues with pages that are duplicated then there are a number of ways to resolve the issue (canonical tags, blocking pages etc) but by far the easiest way to solve the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicates to the main page (usually the one that sits highest in the site architecture).
Forgetting About the Long Tail
Long tail searches are often untapped and badly researched by SEOs. Long tail searches should make up a vast majority of most websites search traffic. Some sites might benefit more from the short searches but for your average Joe Bloggs website the long tail searches will lead to the most conversions. That’s because they are more specific request and therefore indicate commercial intent.
Do your keyword research fully and come up with groups of keywords which show the best long tail variations on your main keywords. Then use these variations cleverly in your title tags, headings, links and on page content.
Site Architecture that Doesn’t Make Sense
A site should be structured with two things in mind… the user (primarily) and the search engines second. Usually if you think about the user you’ll end up with something that makes sense to the search engines as well. You hear the phrase “flat architecture” quite a lot but that only really applies to small sites. “Flat architecture” basically means making every page link to every other page. However this is not something I’m a fan of.
You do not want to have your best pages hidden deep within your site. When it comes to what keyword a page targets you should be thinking about adding the most competitive keywords to the top level pages and as you work away from the home page you can start to target less competitive keywords. This is because the top level pages are generally the most linked to pages and will therefore have the most link power.
Forgetting About the Snippet
I love snippet optimisation and experimenting with what works best for click throughs but a lot of SEOs take no consideration of how their on page changes will effect the appearance of a site’s listing in the search results. Don’t stuff title tags with nonsensical keyword groups. Don’t write description tags that aren’t appealing and grammatical.
Also, keep track with how Google especially makes changes to the snippets they display. I’m thinking about rich snippets here especially.
Over Optimisation
Hhhhm. A tricky one! How do you over optimise and what’s the limit? Well, I’d love to tell you exactly how you over optimise but then a lot of that comes from instinct. If you follow the search engine guidelines you’ll be OK but as soon as you cross into spamville then you might not be so lucky.
The big error usually comes from link building. Using the same anchor text over and over again is the biggest mistake. People don’t naturally link to your site with the same keyword over and over again. It’s just not natural and therefore obviously trying to game the search engines.
With regards to on page over optimisation, keyword stuffing and excessive internal linking can all lead to problems. Less is sometimes more!
