Common SEO Mistakes That Damage Your Business

Who you are, what you do, how technical you think you are and how successful your business has been offline mean little in an online environment that levels playing fields. You may believe you are a market leader but if you are not paying attention to SEO and your website your business has an immediate sell by date written all over it.

In 2011 and beyond all businesses (no matter how small or large) need to be doing everything possible to increase their web presence.

Increasing your web presence and improving your SEO doesn’t always mean writing a blank cheque and investing huge amounts of time and resources. However, you do need to be willing and avoid burying your head in the sand whilst waiting for the internet to go away.

Below are four basic SEO errors that can mean the difference between success and failure online:

Title Tag

Simple, each page on your site should contain a unique and descriptive title tag that is engaging enough for people to click through to your site whilst using targeted anchor text that people can use when linking to you.

Your page title is the first thing people will see when your site appears in search results, bookmarks, tweets and sometimes even in links. With this in mind we could say it’s kind of important.

Navigation

I decided to write this post based on a website I stumbled upon 2 days ago that was built using Flash navigation. As we now live in a civilised web world that has evolved over time, there is no excuse to be using technology from the stone age of the internet. Taking users frustration at being subjected to flash navigation out of the equation, from an SEO perspective, you are giving tiny little search engine spiders Olympic sized hurdles to overcome to find your content. Search engines cannot read flash well and, given the option, they will leave your site as quickly as they came in.

Keywords

Do not pretend you know what your customers want and are searching for. Too many businesses waste time and money optimising their site for ‘industry’ keywords that simply don’t convert. Keywords or phrases you often think are most relevant to your business are the phrases that no customer or client understands (this is why they are looking for experts) or searches for.

To put this into perspective, if I was searching for an e-mail marketing solution to increase my business leads I would most likely search for “email marketing solutions”. An email marketing agency however may see this as “market automation”, an industry related keyword to describe software that helps generate new leads.

As a business owner I need to understand the market I operate in and understand that potential customers are not industry experts and will not search for industry keywords. Whilst highly relevant, these keywords will not deliver any value for my SEO campaign.

Internal Linking

Even the best optimised websites technically still fall foul of this most simple optimisation technique. Optimised internal linking involves a well-structured site that is easy to navigate and uses keywords, where appropriate, to link to other relevant content on your site. Using phrases like “Click Here” or “Found Here” is a complete waste of golden linking opportunity (unless your target keyword for the relevant page is in fact “Click Here”). With the time and money that is often spent optimising your backlink profile why would you then fail to optimise those links that you can easily optimise within minutes.

If you are looking to develop a new SEO campaign or would like some consultation and advice on your current campaign then simply give Venn a call today. Venn are able to offer free and impartial advice to help you avoid these simple errors and others like these that could be costing you money.