Mistakes. We all make them, and ideally we learn from them. But even the smallest of mistakes on your website can sometimes cause big problems. And big problems with a website can cause lost traffic, money, and jobs.
With that in mind, here are 5 mistakes I’ve seen often enough to warrant a mention. I hope that you can learn from others who weren’t so lucky:
1. Telling the search engines you don’t want them to add your website to their database or follow its links.
If the pages of your website are not in Google’s database, then there’s no way you’ll ever receive any search engine traffic — targeted or otherwise. Not a week goes by when I don’t see a website where somehow the “noindex, nofollow” meta tags have been inadvertently added to every page (or even just some pages) of the site. Most of the time, it’s due to a WordPress setting that goes unnoticed when the website is first being designed. If you literally can’t find any page of your site in Google, even for a search on the name of the site or the URL, view the source code to see if you have told Google that you don’t want them to index your site.
I use a Chrome extension called “Nofollow,” which highlights all links that have the nofollow attribute, and also pops up a little window if the page is set at “noindex.” This simple extension is why I end up spotting this so often.
2. Relying on SEO software to “optimize” your website.
Repeat after me: There is no specific number of times a keyword phrase should be used in my content. There is no magic number of words that my pages should have written on them. And there is no best number of words or phrases that belong in a Title tag. And most of all: There is no SEO software that can optimize my website (despite the claims of their creators).
Use your common sense to optimize your site! Learn how your target audience searches for products, services and information such as yours, and write about it accordingly on your website. Then write to make an emotional connection with your visitors so that they’ll convert into happy customers.
3. Improper redirecting of old pages (or sites) to new ones via a 302-redirect instead of a 301-redirect.
Whether you’ve changed your domain name to something different or you’ve redeveloped your website and all or most of your new URLs are different from the old ones, it’s critical to redirect the old to the new via 301-redirects and not 302s. A 301-redirect causes Google to remove the old URL and also to pass the link popularity of the old URL to the new one. But a 302, while redirecting visitors to the correct new URL, will often still be indexed by Google. This causes duplicate content issues and PageRank splitting problems. That is, any links to the old URL will not pass “link juice” to the new one as long as it’s redirected erroneously via a 302.
Check the http header status of your redirected URLs to see if they show a 301 or a 302 via the SEO Consultant’s server header checker tool.
4. Writing to your CEO instead of your customer.
When you’re entrenched in the day-to-day activities of your business, you might forget that the words you use to describe what you do aren’t necessarily the ones that will be used by those unfamiliar with what you do. The people who come to your site shouldn’t need a translator to understand exactly what you do. And you know who the worst offenders are? Marketers! I fundamentally understand marketing at a commonsense level, because it’s a fairly simple concept. Yet when I check out some marketing companies’ websites, they might as well be speaking Martian. In addition to the gobbledygook that many companies write, they also don’t always speak to their potential customer at all. Instead, they try to impress those customers with how great they are.
To fix these copywriting mistakes, find out the words people use to find products and services such
as yours through keyword research, and then tell your potential customers what’s in it for them, rather than how totally awesome YOU are.
5. Creating a new site on a new domain and leaving the old site up as well.
I know that it’s scary to develop a brand-new site — especially if (for whatever reason) you must change domain names. But having 2 websites up at the same time is a recipe for disaster when it comes to the search engines. Every time I’ve seen this done (either on purpose or by mistake), the new website rarely gains any traction in the search engines as long as the old site is still alive and kicking. If you’ve spent time and money creating a kick-ass new website, don’t kill its chances of people finding it through search engines by keeping your old cruddy (but highly ranking) site lurking in the background.
Be sure you follow best SEO redesign practices, 301-redirect all your old URLs to the new, and — if you are changing domain names — perform a “change of address” using your Google Webmaster Tools account. After you do these things, your new site should do at least as well as your old site did in the search engines. More likely than not, it will do even better!
There are probably 100 more SEO rookie mistakes that are made every day, but I hope that these 5 — as well as the tools to help find and fix them — provide you with a good start toward keeping your website mistake free!
Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Consulting company in the Boston, MA area
since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen. If you learned from this article, be sure to invite your colleagues to sign up for the High Rankings Advisor SEO Newsletter so they can receive similar articles in the future!
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Creating a new site on a new domain and leaving the old site up as well.
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This one is the one we see all the time, it tends to only hit sites after a few months when the search engine catches up with itself I guess.
Great article!
Great article as always Jill; your SEO Consultant server header checker link has been disabled by Google.
Good post. Redirects and relying on seo software are my problem. I will have to double check my text and start writing for my target audience. BTW….why is the URL shortener telling me “This URL has been disabled”?
Paul
These are all great insights, another one we see often is missing or duplicate title tags. Every web page should be unique and that means the title tag should be too.
Not sure about number 5. Why would anyone have 2 websites up at the same time? Even changing the domain will not help.
What about having 2 sites with different domain names? But using unrelated content? The URL shortener is giving me a “This URL has been disabled”?
Paul
As a Jill Whalen says, any seo mistakes harms a site traffic. Traffic comes when we have something different than other with latest updates.
The redirect is not a real problem when used to deliver different languages on same URL. For example on this site, the redirect is used to differentiate between users and deliver a specific content, but is nothing that should be ‘punishable’.
C’mon Jill… you were reaching with #5! There are 100 rookie mistakes that smb’s and site owners make before that one such as caving into to those ridiculously cheap seo spam emails that hit everyone’s email box with promises such as “I get you ranked #1 for all keywords for $10″ and then getting slapped for spammy links.
Others that I see all the time:
- not putting a value on social media
- not having a long term strategy for new content production
- not realizing the negative implications image sizes and plugins have on site speed
P.S. – love #4 and wrote something similar recently for our local business journal
Thanks for the comments guys! Not sure why the link to the SEO Consultants tool isn’t working. It’s something whomever uploaded the article put in with the shortened link. I’ll see if I can get them to fix it.
As for #5, believe me it’s something I see often enough, which is why I mentioned it. Yeah sure there are 100′s of others, but they’re talked about so often that I tried to choose ones that someone may not have realized or thought about as having been bad to do.
Jill, The broken links have been corrected and should be working now. Please let me know if there is a problem. Thanks, Debralee, Editor SPN
too true, too true….I can’t begin to tell everyone how many times I’ve stopped myself while preaching that these SEO programs are useless…aside from the obvious nature of “if it’s something that’s available to just anyone, why would it make your site anything special” to “open source = open to hackers”. lol!
Most people just are still not getting it…they recognize now that every business needs a web presence, just most are still in the fog as to what that really means. Agree Herb…social media is just starting to get the recognition from ‘big businesses’ that it deserves. It can make or break a company.
Excellent article…thank you!
Some of your comments i would disagree with. I had to put up a new site for the beef and bottle steakhouse in charlotte nc. I used the .net because their old webmaster died with their .com. So i do have 2 sites up, and my .net after 3 days was and still is in the top 3 for things like best steak restaurant charlotte nc, steak restaurants in charlotte et,. And no sir, u are incorrect about the words in the TITLE, i promise you WILL rank higher with the Keywords in your Title, i wont go on about some of the other stuff you said, needless to say u are off base.
Thanks for finally writing about >5 Rookie SEO Mistakes That Can Kill Your Search Engine Traffic and Some Tools to Help | SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources <Loved it!
Who said not to use keywords in titles? And who are you calling sir?
Nice anchor text comment spam omm.
Hi Jill, You shared good information.
This was one of the best article what I have seen.
This is useful for SEO.
Thanks
You are absolutely right and i am completely agree with your points especially these two points are very important and need to fix “SEO software” and “Improper redirecting of old pages” often SEOs do both the mistakes and they have to pay for it therefore for better position in SERP and to get business as well as traffic we should to avoid these mistakes.
Thanks for the tip about the Chrome extension, I wrote a post a while back you might be interested in: http://chrisdigital.digitaldesigner.com/1160/blogging/free-seo-tools-to-fine-tune-your-website about some free SEO tools I found while I was developing my blog. Cheers.