The 10 most common SEO mistakes
- Broken Information Architecture – These are sites that fail to map the nature of the information they provide into a comprehensible hierarchy. Bad for users and search engines.
- Poor site usability – results in low conversion rates, low lifetime value per visitor, and a less attractive site to link to.
- Poorly managed internal link juice – Some sites misallocate their link juice, resulting in not reaching their most important pages enough.
- Content gets buried over time: A surprising number of sites that create large amounts of content use publishing systems that bury things over time. What a missed opportunity. People and crawlers are looking for these things, don’t hide them!
- Incorrect redirects: why do all engineers with no SEO experience use a 302 redirect by default? OK, that’s probably unfair (you could even say ignorant), but it sure seems that way sometimes.
- Poor Titles and Headings – Keyword tools are wonderful weapons. These are valuable for much more than SEO. Keyword tools tell you what language people are using when referring to your products and services. Even in a world without websites, this is something you would like to know. Then you need to make sure you have pages and content that address the main subject areas related to your business.
- Insufficient Content – No content (or tools) means no links means no traffic. It’s that easy. What unique value do you offer to a visitor to your website? Why would someone link to your site?
- Duplicate Content – It’s amazing how much duplicate content some sites create. It’s a common killer, and it’s a huge factor in poor page rank management.
- All flash site – Very very nice, but not a great experience for a crawler. This doesn’t mean you can’t have an (almost) all-Flash site. Just be sure to offer text link navigation options, and use a technique like Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) to tell the crawler what’s in the movie.
- The same meta description (and keywords) on every page: These items are included in duplicate content filter checks by search engines. And of course, the meta description is important because it is often used as the description that the search engine uses for your web page, so make sure it describes the unique information found on that page.