Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is one of the most cost-effective ways to market your local business online.
SEO is what will determine your placement in search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keywords or keyphrases. And the higher your placement on those pages, the better your chances of sending traffic to your website.
Your SEO strategy will be different depending on your particular product(s) or services. A retailer’s SEO needs will be greatly different from a service’s, which in turn will greatly differ from a restaurant’s.
A B2B business may have a totally different strategy from a B2C business. But no matter what product or service you sell and regardless of whether your target market is oher businesses or consumers, avoidig some common mistakes will save you time and money.
I’ve compiled a list of 10 common mistakes in Search Engine Optimization commonly made by local businesses. These are mistakes I’ve seen made – a few I have made myself – and some are common even for national or international marketers. But I hope this list will get you on the right track in your SEO efforts.
SEO is not rocket science, but if you are unfamiliar with it’s workings, you may be better off hiring someone with the expertise to do the job right the first time.
Here are the 10 Common SEO Mistakes:
1. Not Beginning at the Beginning
Many local businesses may think that SEO is just about keyword selection and copywriting. They don’t realize that SEO can play a critical role in technical decisions they make at the beginning of the process. Key: it’s easier to do it right the first time than to do it over.
2. Improper Use of Title tags
Leaving the <title> tag empty, or just including the site’s name or URL is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title.
3. Use Search Engine Crawler-unfriendly Development Methods
Sometimes a client insists on using Flash for the whole site. Search engines are doing a better job at understanding the content within Flash files, but they still don’t deal with it as well as plain HTML text. Other offenders in this category are JavaScript navigation and “image-only” websites.
4. Using only Images for Headings
Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items.
5. No Canonical Redirect
Many Web sites allow two versions of the same URL, e.g. http://example.com and http://www.example.com, to co-exist without 301 redirecting one version of the URL to the other. This is actually a duplicate content problem, but it’s so common that it deserves its own mention. A somewhat rarer version of this problem to this is where http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com are allowed to co-exist.
6. Ignoring URLs
Also know as Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs, many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are very common often contain URLs such as “index.asp?p=135″ rather than “good-url-for-seo.php”. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for Bing and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.
7. Content “Skinny” Pages
Many sites implement pages that have too little content per page. These can even be pages that the user sees as content rich, such as a page with images showing a product, and basic product information such as price. However, if the only text on the page that differs from other product pages is the title and heading tags and the price, the page could either be seen as a low quality page, or a duplicate.
This is a common trap of shopping cart software where the tendancy is to type in just the basic product information and letting the image do the talking. That may be fine for visitors, but can leave the search engines with little to index.
8. Poor Use of Internal Link and Anchor Text
A surprising number of sites still use “click here” or “more” as the anchor text on many links. This is a loss of a golden opportunity to help search engines understand what the page being linked to is about. There are definitely instances where “click here” or “more” work best, but using keyword-rich link text will deliver better SEO results.
Finding a natural way to include your locale into the link text along with keywords will increase your odds of a higher result for that locale.
9. Local Business Listings
Not having your business listed in the Local Business Centers of Google, Bing and Yahoo is a big mistake. Having it listed improperly or incompletely is also a problem. Map listings often show up before other organic search results when a locality is specified in the keywords typed into a search box so you want to be there when that search is intiated.
And be sure to have as many of your most important keywords as you are allowed to broaden the terms under which you can be found.
10. Not Investing in Site Promotion
Inbound links (and in the future other references to your Web site, company, or products on the Web) are the primary mechanism that search engines use to tell them which are the most important sites related to a particular search query.
If you need help with putting your SEO strategy together, hire someone with the expertise to get the job done properly. Undoing a bad strategy is much more expensive than just doing it right the first time.
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