The early part of the year, especially the 1st quarter, is a time to make resolutions, and then promptly fail to follow them. That said, it’s also a time to for new beginnings, a chance to correct the mistakes of the past.
Within search engine optimization (SEO) there are plenty of mistakes that people make that they need to stop making. So if you do any of the following, it’s time to stop, especially if you want a new beginning for your SEO in 2011.
1. Home is Not Where the Traffic is
Sure, it’s your home page, but that doesn’t mean that you want it to rank for the word “home.” Unless you’re a real estate agent or a construction firm making homes for customers , it makes no sense to call your home page “Home” — and even then you’d want to expand that out with other terms that cover your business.
Your home page should be targeted to the primary terms that you’re trying to rank for. For example, if you’re a restaurant, your home page title should target your restaurant cuisine in your locality.
2. Moving the Staging Robots.txt to the Production Site
This issue happens more often than it should. If done correctly, your staging server’s robots.txt should block all spiders from crawling the site.
However, when the code is pushed live the robots.txt shouldn’t move with it. I’ve seen large sites experience a sudden dip in traffic after release, all due to the spiders doing exactly what they’re being told to do: not to index the production site — you know, the place where you used to make money…
The reverse of this is also an issue: Not blocking the spiders from the staging server. Once a link to a staging server appears in the wild, all bets are off. The staging server will then be indexed, you’ll have duplicate content issues, and the world can see what you’re up to.
Make sure to block spiders from indexing the staging server, and let them in where you want them to be on the production site. The easiest way to do this is to make sure that it’s added in as a step in your QA checklist.
3. Do you use the same Meta Tags for all your pages?
Your pages aren’t all the same, the content is different (at least it had better be), different topics are broached, different products/services sold. So why have a generic description tag on each page?
Yes, you may be “Singapore’s best tailor, selling tailored suits, clothes and other materials,” but that’s not what every page is about. Tailor your meta tags to the content of each page, target the right keywords for each page. Your list of suits for sale should have meta tags reflecting that, while the page for each tool should talk about that tool.
4. Click Here
“Click Here” may seem like a good call to action, to tell users to click through on a link, but it’s not great for the search engines. It doesn’t tell them what the page is about.
If you absolutely, positively, utterly must have text that says “Click here to view pricing for our restaurant menu” make the “restaurant menu” text be the anchor text in the hyperlink. This tells the search engines that the page you’re linking to is about the “restaurant menu,” and will help your page to be found by your potential customers.
5. Set it and Forget it
SEO is not a once and done process, even though some people believe it is. Search algorithms change on an almost daily basis. Your competition isn’t necessarily sitting back sipping iced tea waiting for the traffic to roll in. Besides, we’re talking about 200 over different algorithms altogether.
Even keywords change as new phrases enter the lexicon and may begin to outpace the ones you were initially targeting. And if your corporate strategy changes, don’t you think the optimization efforts on your site may need to change?
Someone needs to be in charge of monitoring your site. That includes an analytics solution and other monitoring tools, such as Google Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics.
It’s amazing how many sites haven’t implemented an analytics solution or at least don’t have one implemented correctly. Does your analytics solution track your entire sales funnel? Do you know where in the sales process you lose the majority of your prospects?
With those tools at hand, problems — and potential opportunities — on your site can be identified.
6. Impatience
“I want it all, and I want it now,” was fine as a Queen lyric, but it doesn’t work for SEO. Getting a site to the top of the SERPs takes time, and depending on the competition for the keyword(s), may never be possible for your page.
It may take time to get the new pages crawled, to get the right, good quality links into the pages, and for them to move up the rankings. All the players involved in the SEO process must understand this. So set the expectations early and frequently with clear communication.
