HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Current Articles | RSS Feed RSS Feed

Top 10 Most Egregious SEO Mistakes

Digg digg it | Reddit reddit | del.icio.us del.icio.us | StumbleUpon StumbleUpon 

As an Internet Marketing Advisor at HubSpot, I get to talk to all of the people who are interested in learning more about our inbound marketing system and who want to do internet marketing more effectively.

Some of them know that they want our help; know what they need to do and they have a pretty good idea of how to do it. They just need some guidance and the right tools and systems in place.

Most people, though, still have a lot to learn. Search Engine Optimization, although only a piece of what we help people do, seems to be the most common challenge that causes people to initially seek our help. It's also the thing that people seem most confused about, as well as the thing that people make the most mistakes doing, whether they have a SEO consultant involved or not.

The name of the game for search engine optimization is extremely simple. Once you're up and running with the right tools and systems, all you need to do is....

Publish new GREAT content on new pages on your website REGULARLY.

People get so confused about SEO. They are usually just wrapped up in all of the details.

But, if you want to do SEO correctly, there's one thing that you will spend the majority of your time doing: Writing Great Content.

We're talking 90% of the time you spend doing SEO should be spent writing about you, your industry, your business, your products, your services and the problems you solve for your clients. All stuff that should be second nature to you.

Yeah. You need to learn a few other things.

But, if you can write, you can do SEO. The rest can be taught. And the rest should not distract you from writing.

Unless... you fall victim to one of these mistakes.

Top 10 Most Egregious SEO Mistakes

David Letterman Style, here it is:

#10. You're optimizing your website around really common (probably really popular) keywords that you'll never be able to rank for. In the last week, I've had two people tell me they wanted to optimize their site around "leadership". I said, good luck competing with Wikipedia and About.com.

#9. Everyone of your title tags has the same keyword phrase in it. And it's your company name. The title tag on a page is probably the most important On-Page SEO factor to consider when creating new pages. You probably already rank well for a search on your company name, so you can safely leave that out and still get that traffic. So, make sure you pick appropriate keyword phrases for each page that are phrases that someone is going to type into a search engine in order to find a product or service like yours.

#8. Dynamic URLs without your keywords in it. You bought a fancy shopping cart or content management system (CMS) that uses dynamic urls with all kinds of random numbers and random letters in the url. Your URLs should be readable by humans because search engines read words like humans too. The words in your URLs is another very important signal to search engines what that page is about. So, get yourself a CMS that allows you to control your urls or get yourself a URL rewriter. Include your keywords in your URLs.

#7. You used images as headings. Headings are usually the big bold letters right above the content at the top of a page usually below your navigation. See "HubSpot Inbound Internet Marketing Blog". That's a heading. If these are "words built with images" (designers do this to control the font of the text), search engines aren't reading them. These should be text. Pick a web safe font that's close to what you want. Go with that.

#6. Number 6 is equally egregious, but a little less common nowadays unless your website is circa 1997... If your navigation is built using image buttons instead of text, you're giving search engine one less signal about what that page is about. See #7 for a fix: Use text.

#5. All of the above. I've seen it happen. I've seen sites with all of the above mistakes. Really. Honest.

#4. Doing SEO after the website is designed and built. For some reason, people think SEO should start afterwards. I've been racking my brain for an analogy, but it's really pretty simple: Do you go on a trip before you pack? Do you launch a business before writing some sort of business plan? Do you visit to a friend's new house without printing out driving directions?

SEO done right allows you to determine what content to write in order to get traffic from search engines. And you shouldn't design a site before you know what content will be on it. I'm not saying that you should change your business model or product name based on what keywords will be easiest to rank for, but you should consider it. I guarrantee you that your competitors or smart internet marketers are doing this homework. Why not claim the search traffic for your business? It only takes a little bit of planning.

Plus, if you go to a designer or web developer that isn't an expert at SEO (Most aren't - even though they say they are), they may not implement a system that allows you to publish new pages and optimize your site around your keywords without paying them $100/hour to make the changes and additions for you. Someone that knows SEO will launch your website in a system that allows you to easily do SEO on a continous basis.

Which brings us to...

#3. Our design firm "DID" SEO for us. This one is probably the most common. There is no such thing as "BEING DONE" with SEO. It's an ongoing thing. Just the other night, I logged into HubSpot's Keyword Grader tool and found 2 new keywords that we should target. We rank not-quite-on-the-first-page for both of them and both of them could deliver several several hundred visitors/month once we get to the first page. That's hundreds more visitors we could attract to our site - with a bit of effort. And we already rank for "internet marketing", "internet marketing software" and a bunch of other great phrases that are relevant to our business. Doing SEO once is like doing prospecting once. If your salesperson said "I called prospects last month" as a reason for not calling any new prospects this month, what would you say to them right before you fired them?

#2. You built your website entirely in flash. You might as well put an invisible shield up between you and the search engines because they don't see you.

#1. And the number one most egregious mistake. Drumroll, please... Your site is built entirely in flash, you're a web design firm and you advertise that you do SEO. I've run into two of these people recently. I won't link to them even though they deserve to be called out.

That about covers it. I hope this was a fun way for you to learn HOW TO DO SEO and not just HOW NOT TO DO SEO. I recently wrote a more detailed post on my blog about how to continuously identify new keywords for your content creation and link building efforts which details the few things that you need to know besides content creation to do SEO effectively. It should dispel any misconception that SEO is some mysterious science not comprehensible by mere business mortals. 

Have you seen other egregious SEO mistakes that should be included in the Top 100 List?  Leave a comment below and share with the community.

Posted by Pete Caputa on Thu, Mar 13, 2008 @ 10:08 AM

COMMENTS

Something that should be included in the Top 100:
- no duplicate content (maybe in addition to #9)
- no "Previous Page | Next Page" (like you and many others use), but numbers to reach more/some sites with one click, e.g. "First | 2 ... 5 | 6 | Last"

posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 1:41 PM by Stevie


Well done!
I would also add "Overusing the Meta Keyword tag" to the list...

posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 1:52 PM by Matt


Great points, Matt and Stevie.
Agreed on all points. They should definitely be in the top 100.
Keep em' coming.
(Thanks for the comment, btw. This is my first post on the HubSpot blog.)

posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 1:54 PM by peter caputa


Excellent tips -- and very useful.
I would extend #9 to say that it is rarely a good idea to make the page title of your home page "Home" (or even include the word "home") -- unless this word describes your business.
Each word in the page title counts. The more words, the less influence each word has as a signal to the search engines. Don't waste this important real-estate on superfluous words.

posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 2:03 PM by


Definitely, Dharmesh.
The old "home" titte tag. Love that one.

posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 2:18 PM by peter caputa


I would also add "keyword stuffing" as another offense, especially if you plan to expand the list at some point (unlike Letterman does).

posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 8:39 PM by SEO Services


Thank you for yet again, another informative post from this web site. Right after I read today's entry, I fired off a new round of HTML changes to my web editor & Domain host, probably another $30 worth of changes, but they will bring me $3000 worth of additional revenue in the coming years.....THANK YOU from DJ MC

posted on Friday, March 14, 2008 at 1:22 AM by Sacramento Wedding DJs


great information, it looks like we still have a lot to learn in finding better ways to optimize our website and attracting private equity investors!

posted on Friday, March 14, 2008 at 4:10 PM by Peter van Kooij


Excellent article, ironically I was actually approached by an Seo company that actually had a complete flash website. Why do they do it!?? Why?
Completely agree about Seo being involved from the word go. Although it can be tricky when the client has an idea as to what they want. Normally flash based ;@)
As for title tags, my only comments are that too many prime key phrases weaken the overall effect and with that in mind I personally only ever use a couple of prime key phrases per page.

posted on Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 1:04 PM by Search engine optimisation manchester


I'm sorry to sound offensive, but did you write this post in your sleep or something?
#9 -- What about branding? If you have a shortened website brand name in your title, it will show in search engine results. OK so you've got the URL, but where's there harm in:
"Top 10 Most Egregious SEO Mistakes | HubSpot"
Much better than the current title.
#7 Do you know what a header is? I think you're confused with headings maybe?
I won't even mention the last two.
OK so I only skim read this post, so maybe i missed something, like you were being sarcastic or joking when you wrote it, I don't know?

posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 at 5:18 AM by ChrisJB


Thanks for pointing out the errors, ChrisJB. I've changed it say "headings" instead of headers.
Regarding #9 - the more words in a title tag, the more diluted your SEO efforts towards you target keyword phrase is. So, we usually recommend that our clients leave out their company name. If they are going to include it, we tell them to do it like you recommended: by having it at the end.
It'd be great if you could point out the other two errors. I'd like to fix or address those, for the benefit of the other readers.

posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 1:32 PM by


Fair enough, it's an easy mistaker to maker.
I just think that people should consider the golden rule when it comes to White Hat SEO: Don't do it for the search engines, do it for the searchers.
By the way I'd like to re-iterate -- I didn't mean to sound offensive, although my comment does seem rather rude ; ) apologies
I think we need to recognise that it is the search engines that are failing, not the flash designers. Out of the two (search engine algorithms that do not accomodate flash properly and flash websites), which do you think will prevail in the long run?
I would stick to you first bolded point; after that it's just a case of good usability, common sense and creativity.

posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 1:58 PM by ChrisJB


I see. You're a flash guy.
I think it's important to note that Flash can be used properly to make a site pop. It should be used as a visual element, not to manage navigation or to code an entire site. I have seen a lot of very well SEOd sites that use flash really well as an accent. But, I've seen one too many that use it at the detriment of "being findable" by search engines.
I don't know all of the technical stuff behind how search engines parse websites, but I don't think it's possible to parse flash like it's possible to parse html, just like *text* search engines can't really determine what an image is without some alt text associated with it.
Maybe there's smart ways to code flash so that it's indexable? Maybe there's smarter search crawlers that will eventually index flash websites?

posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 2:08 PM by


You can use Flash and have a great rank.
Even if your entire site is in flash, create a HTML version of the site as well; use javascript to replace the HTML with your SWF. Search spiders don't parse the JS so they see the HTML; anyone with JS will see your Flash instead.

posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 9:37 AM by Dave


thanks for the info. it seems like a lot of extra work, though.

posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 9:47 AM by


I forgot to include an example.
http://www.robwitzel.com/
Rob has his homepage in all HTML. Everything else is Flash.
When I started working with Rob, he had no real ranking. If I remember correctly, he showed up on page 8 or 9 for the term: gainesville wedding photographer.
I created a HTML version of his all Flash portfolio and used the method I spoke of above. A few months and some inbound links later he ranks #1.
Where we started with just a couple pages in the Google index (because of it being primarily flash), we now have 33. His site looks nearly identical (except for a <H1> I put on his index page)

posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 9:49 AM by dave


Pete, you are very right, it is tons of extra work; a trade-off for sure.

posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 9:51 AM by Dave


Dave. Your site is a perfect example of how flash can be used successfully as an accent, while still using html for navigation and pages in order to be able to do SEO successfully.
Dave's site:
http://www.smartmarketingnow.com

posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 9:56 AM by


Thanks Pete, we just launched that site, so there are still a couple things to fix but I think it turned out pretty nice.
I did like your article very much, especially #4, I think it is typical for people to start SEO after their site is built and you bring up a very valid point about this and other important issues. I actually laughed out loud when I read 'Our design firm "DID" SEO for us.'. I can't even tell you how many times I've heard this myself.

posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 10:21 AM by dave


I don't have any flash sites, but i did not know that engines can't see flash. This is good to know.
Also on title tags, are you referring to post titles? Like when i write a post, the title i give it.
And on dynamic URL's, wordpress (the blog cms) has a feature that lets you choose how to have your URL displayed. Wordpress is very SEO aware and friendly.
I'm confused on something called H1 tags. What are these, and how do i incorporate this on my blog?
Missy.

posted on Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 12:37 PM by Missy Diaz


The best search engine placement specialist can blend art and science to direct the engines like baiting an animal with a breadcrumb trail. It is important to note that no two search engines work exactly the same way. Each company beats their chest with great pride touting the BEST mathmatical formulas to deliver the most relevant stuff. An old school way to lure great placement was by using the keywords, over and over on the page. This evolved to repetitious words but using the same font color as the background (i.e; white font on white background). This renders the words invisible but would trick the indexers. Sounds great, right? Wrong! Most engines know what you are up to and disqualify your page. You’re out! Marketing ClubSkinny jeans was quite a challenge. Greg Ventresca

posted on Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 8:16 PM by Greg Ventresca


@missy sorry for the delay. Typically, on wp installations, post titles are wrapped in title tags. You are right, WP does a great job of making it easy to optimize a site. Most blog software does.
@greg. We actually don't flaunt our mathematical equations as much as we should. We're tracking several hundred websites and several keywords and we make conclusions about what's important in SEO based on this data. So, our algorithms adapt when google's algorithms change.
We use this data to figure out what's important in the search engine's algorithms and then we teach our clients how to do SEO. It helps them avoid "the challenge" of making a lot of mistakes.

posted on Thursday, May 01, 2008 at 2:21 PM by peter caputa


Brilliant article Pete and something SEO people can/could use to point their clients to for a read as it really does clarify a lot of things that elsewhere are er wll let's say not quite so clearly explained.
I would like to add a common mistake made by people RE SEO and links.
How mant times do you see the "Click here" links on websites? They still appear all over the place and people ought to know that "descriptive links" are much better.
The spiders can index a link that has more descriptive words that actually match up to the document that would appear more easily than a "Click here" hyperlink which offers no easily defined information.
I was so impressed by the above article I started a thread about it on my forum!
Nice to see someone who agrees with me that "text content" is the key.
"Great Written Content" is still <b>"the"</b> thing when it comes to websites and will be for the forseeable future.
Write Great Content - I have said the same thing myself so many times it's not funny. I have even beem slammed on some forums for disagreeing with people over Google PR and stating that in fact "Great Written Content" is more important as the primary consideration as Google PR can be built by others for you when you write great content.
I get the impression from your article Pete that you would more than likely probably agree with me that indeed "Content is still King"?

posted on Sunday, June 01, 2008 at 10:43 AM by K D Mains


Content is certainly still KING. Will be for a long time.

posted on Monday, June 02, 2008 at 7:28 AM by


Post Comment
Name
 *
Email
 *
Website (optional)
Comment
 *

Allowed tags: <a> link, <b> bold, <i> italics

Receive email when someone replies.

HubSpot Marketing Blog

The HubSpot Internet Marketing blog helps businesses leverage inbound marketing practices using the Internet to get found by more prospects and convert more prospects to leads and customers.  A full RSS feed is available, or you can sign up by email below.

Subscribe to our RSS Feed

HubSpot RSS Feed

Inbound Marketing Summit

Marketing Conference

Free Marketing Resources

Popular Posts

Browse by Tag