SEO – What it Is and Pitfalls to Avoid

One of the biggest issues in search engine optimization (SEO) is the lack of credit that it receives in enticing traffic to your website. Many times, the root of this issue is at the senior management level. They aren’t familiar with SEO and how it works. Because of the lack of understanding, they can easily make decisions that are disastrous from an SEO perspective.

SEO is the improvement of the volume and quality of traffic to web pages or websites from search engines through natural search results for targeted keywords. Most often, a website that gets a higher ranking in the search results is the one that the searchers will visit more frequently. Therefore, it is critical that a site is optimized to get traffic the correct way to make it more search-engine friendly and get a higher ranking in the search results.

The concept behind the SEO technique is to get the topmost ranking without paying since your site is relevant to the search query entered by the user. The time spent on optimizing a website to draw traffic can range from a few minutes to a long-term activity.

If your product or service has unusual keywords, some general SEO would be sufficient to get a top rating. However, if your product or service industry is competitive or is in a saturated market, then it is important to dedicate a considerable amount of time and effort to SEO. Even if simple SEO solutions are used, it is necessary to understand how search engine algorithms work and which items are crucial in SEO to get traffic.

The tactics of SEO can vary to achieve top ranking in search results. These fall into two categories (White-Hat SEO and Black-Hat SEO), depending on legitimacy and ethics. White-Hat SEO uses strategies that are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEOs and search engines while spidering a site. Black-Hat SEO uses illegitimate and ethically incorrect techniques, such as keyword stuffing, page stuffing, and invisible text, which will cause your website to be banned by search engines. It is best to avoid Black-Hat SEO altogether.

The following are some SEO pitfalls to avoid.

• Not Starting Early Enough
  Even companies that understand the importance of SEOs tend to begin the process too late. People in these companies may believe that SEO is about copywriting and keyword selection; however, they don’t realize that SEO also plays an essential part in technical implementation decisions. The main thing to remember here that it is easier to do it right the first time than to do it incorrectly and have to do it all over again.

 

• Choosing an Inappropriate Content Management System (CMS)
  Many CMSs are missing the basic SEO features, such as being able to select title tags, headings, and anchor text. Other CMSs might have these basics but aren’t crawler-friendly or create massive content duplication.

 

• Use Crawler Unfriendly Design
  Sometimes, a senior marketing manager insists on using Flash for the whole site. Search engines now have a better understanding of the content within Flash files, but their understanding is still not as good as with plain HTML text. Nowadays, there are also ways to totally block search engine spiders, such as implementing links in JavaScript that can’t be parsed by the crawler.

 

• Content Duplication
  There are several ways in which duplicate content can occur, such as creating print pages or referring to pages on the site with more than one URL (example: www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html. Many websites allow http://example.com and http://www.example.com to exist side by side without redirecting one version of the URL to the other. A somewhat rarer cousin to this is where http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com are allowed to co-exist.

 

• Thin Content Pages
  Many sites implement pages that don’t have enough content per page. These might 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 will either be seen as a low-quality page or as duplicate content.

 

• Poor Use of Internal Anchor Text
  A large number of sites still use "click here" or "more" as the anchor text on many links. This is a shame because it is a loss of a golden opportunity to help search engines understand what the page being linked to is about.

 

• Over-Optimized Pages
  Sometimes, people go crazy after learning about SEO. They start creating overly keyword-rich pages in an effort to increase their rankings. This can easily create a poor experience for the user, resulting in a decrease in conversion rates and/or the site being less attractive and compelling for others to link to.

  One warning sign of this is when you hear people talk about "SEO copywriting." This is a red flag that the author of the content is thinking about search engines and not users, and that will get you into trouble. You’re almost always better off having the writer focus on creating quality content, with you controlling the title of the article so that you can make sure that the keyword(s) is in it.

 

• Not Investing in Site Promotion
  Many organizations feel that the process is complete once a site is launched. They don’t realize that the website needs to be promoted as much as any other product or service. Inbound links (and in the future, other references to your website, company, or products on the Web) are the main voting mechanism that search engines use to tell them which are the most important sites related to a particular search query.

Summary

Education is the best way to prevent these issues from occurring. Help your senior managers to understand what SEO is about in a way that is meaningful and relative to them.

If you need help with putting that together, hire a senior SEO professional to come in and do the job for you. Once they understand the business implications of their decisions, most senior managers will make far better decisions about the website(s) and SEO.

To learn more about how Internet marketing is essential to the success of your business, please visit us at CompuKol Communications.