As to the linking area, there are a variety of issues connected with finding out how many back links you have, to say nothing of getting those back links in the first place. The area of “other issues” simply deals with points that didn’t seem to fit neatly into one of the other three categories. That doesn’t make them any less important however. Without further ado, then, let’s start discussing the things you need to make sure you’ve done with your meta tags and on-page optimization when performing SEO on a web site. The field itself has not been around very long. Starting in the mid-1990s, it fell to webmasters to optimize web sites so that they showed up high in the search engine results pages. A landmark of sorts was reached in 1996 when the first email spam touting SEO services started hitting electronic inboxes. Usenet references to SEO did not appear until 1997.However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, Fixing broken links is easy provided you know exactly which links to remove or modify. But how do you know which links are broken and which aren't? Nowadays, a search on the phrase “search engine optimization” in Google (without quotes) yields well over 43 million matches. The acronym SEO delivers 118 million matches. There are forums, blogs, articles, companies, independent contractors, and many web sites devoted to the pursuit of SEO to make money one way or another. With all that action, one would suppose that it is a promising field. The technical issues category deals with the kinds of things that are easy to check with a computer, (usually) easy to fix, and probably don’t affect your users on a conscious level. Even so, they’ll affect whether a web surfer is likely to find your site in the search engines and follow a link to become a visitor. Once the visitor arrives, some of these factors will also affect whether or not he or she wants to stay. 34.Picking An SEO-friendly Web Designer As an SEO we get two kinds of sites; those that were designed in the past and where the designer is no longer involved, and the sites where the design is either ongoing or we are working with the web designers from the start. Both of these have their pros and cons as an SEO but there is a clear advantage of one over the other for the client. Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - The Wrong Kind of Exposure When I talk about the wrong kind of exposure in this case I don’t mean bad publicity. I mean exposing information to the public that they were never intended to see. Jordan gives one example involving a common web site management platform that stored site statistics in a folder labeled /statistics/. That security hole may or may not exist today, but the principle certainly holds: if you don’t want the whole world to see a particular file, secure it. Another example of the wrong kind of exposure is what happened when AOL published a search data report in 2006. Its publication was intentional, but it was not well thought out. Supposedly AOL tried to scrub the personal information off of the search data it published, so that searchers would remain anonymous. It didn’t quite work that way; at least one major publication was able to identify one of the users from her searches. The mess led to the resignation of the company’s chief technical officer. First, let's discuss the pros and cons to the SEO. If we are coming in after the design is completed there are more than likely (and by that I mean 99.9% likely) some structural and or major design issues that will need to be addressed. Unless the web designer is skilled in SE-friendly design we are going to have our work cut out for us just dealing with structural issues. On the positive side of this scenario, we're left to just work on the site with no designer taking it personally when we tell them we need to make changes (and that can lead to some issues). Finally, here are a couple of domain name mistakes I hope most of you know better than to make. The first is buying the .biz version of a domain name when the version is available; top level domains are still better known and more respected than .biz domains, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. And the second is promoting a site you don’t even own. Make SURE you buy the right site and spell it correctly in all of your marketing literature and advertisements. Now let's look at the other scenario. Working with a designer has it's cons which is generally – we're going to have a designer taking it personally when we need changes made to the structure of a site or challenging us when we're arguing that while an all-Flash site is visually appealing, it leaves something to be desired from and SEO standpoint. This conversation generally goes something like this (and all you SEO's out there can sing along): SEO – Flash cannot be properly read in the same way as HTML and we need to have easily spidered content for the search engines to see. Designer – Flash can be read by Google. SEO – But not in the same way. We need multiple pages of optimized content and Flash just isn't going to provide that. Designer – Well I disagree (probably read in some forum somewhere that a misc. guy had no problem ranking for “bob wyverniuschuck artist” with a Flash site) but even if that's true – it's the conversion that counts and this Flash site is going to convert. SEO – Yes we understand that conversions are important but so is traffic. If we can't get traffic to the site then a 100% conversion ratio is irrelevant. Designer – There are other ways to get traffic. SEO - Yes I understand that but this is what the client has hired us to do and has asked that we work together to build an attractive site that ranks well. Designer – I'm going to have to talk to them about this ... SEO - another big sigh in preparation to talk to the client about the fact that you DIDN'T say conversions are irrelevant, etc. etc. Not all domain debacles come from spelling errors. Some come from math errors – or, more precisely, forgetting to pay the bills. In 1999, Microsoft forgot to renew its Passport domain; in 2003, it forgot to renew its Hotmail.co.uk domain. In both cases, generous individuals paid the fees and handed the domains back to the software giant, but not all stories have such a happy ending.When choosing a domain name, make sure that it is short, easy to remember, and easy to spell. You should also always opt for the top-level-domain, because most people remember better than any other. If you are going to use a keyword, terms search engines perceive as capturing the essence of your site, in your domain, make sure you use dashes (-), periods, or slashes to separate words. This will help you find a unique domain name for a popular keyword, but keywords in domain names generally don't help that much. It is also recommended not to use a domain forwarding service. So this is the down side and an extreme example of it (for humor as much as illustration). But there's a big upside and that comes when you have the opportunity to work with web designers who know how important SEO is (as an SEO who knows how important a good design is). Working to balance the two can be a daunting task and having the skills of the SEO matched with the skills of the web designer can be a true blessing. For example, I may have a great idea to make a site more easily navigated by search engines but an ugly solution to implement it whereas the designer may have a more attractive solution in mind if they know the problem and the technical solution. Let’s move from spelling errors to a canonical matter. I suppose you could still consider this a spelling issue, though. Is your site spelled , or Think fast, because you get to pick only one. Google, however, will see all three – and its duplicate content alarms will go off. You can avoid this issue by deciding that one site spelling is canonical and using the appropriate redirects for the other spellings. From what I have read, the current consensus for the best URL format to use isn’t any of the ones listed above, with the slash on the end. Whichever format you use, be consistent. Such a scenario has recently come about in our dealings with Moonrise Design. Moonrise contacted us in advance of their starting work for a client, had us sit in on conference calls to understand the client's needs and has since had us helping structure the site properly from the ground up. There is no resistance and we don't tell them what to do, we indicate the functions required – provide any technical background as necessary – and they implement it in a way that leaves the site FAR more attractive than if we had had to do it ourselves. Expert designers doing what they do best and understanding that what we do is SEO and the client wants to rank highly. Ah, it's a beautiful thing. Kalena Jordan writing for Site Pro News mentioned the client who thought he’d told a designer to buy . The designer heard . The latter was available; the former was not. But that’s not the only kind of mistake you can get into with spelling. Remember that a domain name doesn’t show up in the browser in CamelType – so think carefully about what it might spell if the capitals fell in a different place. is a deliberate parody site, but there have been cases of others that weren’t, simply because they didn’t think about what their chosen domains might spell with different stresses. It is this experience and reflecting back on other web designers we've worked smoothly with in the past that inspired me to write this article. The article is more for potential clients of designers than for the designers themselves. So for those looking for a designer – if you want your site to rank highly and/or you'll be hiring an SEO – here's what to look for. Don't overdo your keywords and don't duplicate it on the pages of the website. Content should be fresh and unique. Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - Domain Disasters What could be more basic than your domain name? Perhaps that’s the reason that so many SEO errors revolve around this basic necessity. Maybe it’s because I’m an editor as well as a writer, but to me, one of the more painful mistakes has to be misspelling your domain name. If you’re buying your own domain name, and you know how to spell well, that might not be as big an issue. But if you don’t, or you’re simply telling a web site designer to buy it for you, you can run into some problems. Picking A Web Designer There are two main considerations that you'll need to make when you're picking your web designer. The first is, can they build an attractive site and the second is can they build a search engine friendly site? Before I go into detail about the specific things you need to avoid, I’m going to tell you what I think is the biggest SEO mistake anyone can make if they’re serious about making money from their web site. That mistake is neglecting to stay on top of the trends and information pertaining to the field. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising. Building an attractive site: I am probably the last person to ask about what's attractive and what's not. When the Beanstalk site was up for a redesign a couple years ago I hired a professional web design company to build it. I can't create pretty things but I know how to test and I know how to monitor statistics to see if the traffic is behaving as I would hope. Making mistakes in the way you optimize your web site can cost you, both tangibly and intangibly. The tangible cost, of course, comes in money, whether your site is directly engaged in e-commerce or makes its money from advertising. The intangible cost comes in lost traffic and wasted effort. Even when the rest of your site’s SEO is impeccable, certain mistakes can wipe out all the benefits you’d otherwise gain. Here's what to look at: When you're choosing a designer take a look at their portfolio – put some of their designs past people in your target demographic and see what they think. It's also wise to view the sites of the leaders in your industry to see what they're doing (and maybe even who designed their sites). Just because you like something doesn't mean it's effective to your target market.your site will get more benefit. There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building. If you really are just starting to do SEO, by reading this article you can learn from the mistakes of others. And if you’ve been doing SEO for a while but never made these mistakes, don’t feel excluded; there’s no way I could cover every possible mistake in a single article. Indeed, judging from the links I turned up, I could fill a whole book with SEO mistakes to avoid. At least a couple of chapters could be devoted to blogging mistakes, which I don’t plan to cover in any great detail here.One contributor to the SEO Chat forum suggests spending a lot of time in SEO forums, asking a lot of questions, then coming back several times a day and doing it all over again. He suggests this as a daily ritual. You also need to know if your designer is skilled at conversion optimization. Have they read such works as Enquiro's eye tracking studies. Have they done their research (or have you) regarding which colors make people act in which ways? These are extremely important issues to be aware of. If you look at the eye tracking studies - the Beanstalk site places our logo, the Hacker Safe logo and main title in the key zones. We also went with green giving a natural (easy on the eyes) feel that implies wealth and is strongly associated with money. When we changed to our current design the effects were immediately detectable in how our visitors behaved visiting more pages for longer periods of time and, most importantly, increasing our communication with us significantly. You probably know that Google turns up more than 23 million hits if you search for SEO. It also turns up 174,000 for the phrase “SEO mistakes” (without quotation marks). So if, while you’re reading my article, you discover that you’re doing something you shouldn’t be, take heart – you’re in good company. And it isn’t too late to make amends. If your designer is not aware of these things do not despair, they may be a fine designer indeed and may have this understanding intuitively (though a little research to back up any intuition is always a sound policy). That said, be aware of the information that is out there and ask questions when you're asked to approve designs. Building a search engine friendly site: This is crucially important but probably one of the areas we have to address most frequently. I can't possibly get into all the various areas of search engine friendly design so I'll simply list off a couple of the most common issue we encounter and then provide references to other reading. Fifth, you could work at becoming popular, and having enough people around you all the time that it scares off the bully. Aull’s explanation of this approach is worth quoting at length; she advocates becoming “a valued member of the web ‘community’ by linking generously, taking advantage of social networking, and developing useful content, resources and tools that others will naturally want to link to. The more ‘web friends’ you have linking to your pages, the stronger your pages will be, and the more sources of traffic you’ll have that don’t depend on the search engines. Getting caught can result in a much lower ranking or an all-out ban from the search engine. Either way, it's important to know what techniques are considered deception so that, if anything, you'll know what to avoid. Enormous amounts of code on the page. For some reason, even some new designs are coming to us as though they were out of 1998 as far as the page code is concerned. This just gives the search engines a lot more to dig through to find what they want – the content. I'm not even going to get into tables as that opens a whole other can of worms. If your site is table-based (your designer or SEO will be able to tell you this if you don't know) there are some basic practices to insure that the code these tables add is minimized. Unfortunately I can't get into the myriad of different situations this can entail and will have to save it for a future article (so be sure to bookmark our SEO blog to keep up-to-date on that and other developments in the industry). Fourth, you could avoid the bully. This is not the same thing as ignoring him. You simply make sure you aren’t where he is. In terms of SEO, you start targeting keywords and phrases that the black hat isn’t using. By using this approach, you can narrowly target your audience and start picking up traffic from “long tail” searches. You can also work on making your site more inviting to visitors, so when you do get that traffic they’re more likely to convert. Bad internal links. You want your internal pages to rank. Most sites will generally target the highest priority phrases on the homepage of the site but the internal pages are the ones that will rank for specific products, services and long tail phrases. To maximize the rankability of the internal pages you need them to be easily found by the spiders and you need to associate these pages with the keywords you're targeting. Third, you could report the offender to Google. Unfortunately, like the adult aides monitoring recess in the schoolyard, Google can only act on behavior it actually sees. As Aull notes, “there’s no guarantee they’ll do anything about the miscreants quickly – or ever, for that matter.” It could also encourage a black hat SEO to start using even sneakier techniques. If your designer is using image or script-based navigation for aesthetic reasons that's fine. In fact, it'll likely leave you with a more appealing site visually however you need to make sure your key pages are linked to in the content of you homepage or from text in the footer to insure they get found and spidered quickly and easily.You can certainly get away with something shorter and with fewer key words (remember, ideally, that you should use only one key phrase per page). You might want to use the “View Source” command on a variety of web sites, especially those that score high in the SERPs, if you need to get a better idea of how the META key words and META description tags are used. Second, you could take up negative SEO yourself, fighting fire with fire. That might be satisfying for a while, but your success will ring hollow after both sites are banned from the SERPs. Like a high school principal, Google isn’t going to care who started it.
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