Mark Nunney's 12 most common SEO mistakes: SEO expert series by Rachelle Money, 26 June 2008

Have you ever embarked on some SEO work and got that sinking feeling that you might be doing something wrong? You're not alone. Our expert Mark Nunney gives us the dirty dozen top mistakes he sees being made in SEO, as well as tips on how to negotiate the pitfalls.

We asked our SEO expert Mark Nunney to give us a list of the five most common mistakes made in Search Engine Optimization and he gave us 12! Here they are…

1. Missing the big picture

Most SEO advice is given for a single page, word or technique. If a site is to help a small business then that site is going to need hundreds of pages targeting thousands of keywords, and using a wide range of techniques. All of these pages, keywords and techniques need to work together so you need a plan coordinate that. So what are the techniques? Keyword research (a great tool for this being Wordtracker), strategy, site structure and navigation, on page SEO, link building and online PR.

2. Not having a keyword or SEO strategy

What are you trying to achieve? Most importantly your SEO strategy should serve the company, marketing and brand strategies. A keyword strategy is a prioritized list of the company’s target markets' niches, as defined by the keywords used in those niches - the words and phrases used in search engines.

3. Putting too much trust in an SEO company

You need to get whoever you have approached to prove it, prove what they've done even when you have a personal reference for that company. You should take a step back and ask yourself, 'what is being delivered? Make sure you are getting your money's worth.

Often they (businesses) will see a company with a nice website and they may be inclined to trust them because of that.

4. Having a company structure or systems that are unable to accommodate change and/or something completely new

Change isn’t always about something new. Change is always difficult, but combine it with something completely new and you’ve got yourself a problem. The new thing is SEO and online marketing - neither is particularly well understood or even trusted, and in some cases companies have never heard of it.

Change is never going to happen unless those with authority and responsibility absolutely insist it does. The result of this is that it allows small companies, who do embrace SEO, to do well. Here’s a nice example - do a search for hotels in London, Paris or New York. You would think you would see all the top names, but you’d be lucky to find Expedia or other companies you’ve heard of.

5. Not coordinating SEO with your editorial, sales and marketing departments

There is little point in having new content without SEO to maximize the visitors seeing that content. There is little point in SEO without marketing to convert the visitors to whatever it is you want them to do. And there is little point in marketing without sales. You have to make them work together and be part of the process.

6. Not monitoring results or acting accordingly

You have to monitor the numbers buying your product or signing up to your newsletter. You may find that the market niche you hoped would work ends up being rubbish, and in that case move on. You have to monitor traffic, rankings and response for relevant searches. If you are getting results you need to move on to the next stage; that might be moving on to the next niche, or perhaps your results are coming from your homepage and you now have to move to get that success transferred to pages deeper in your site.

7. Poor content management systems

It’s a cliché to say you need the right tools to do the job. In SEO and online marketing you need a CMS that gives you complete control over most of the content, on most of the pages, including site navigation, menus and all marketing content. Not having that is like entering a Formula 1 race on a scooter. The solution is to find out what’s needed and get it and rebuild if necessary. I use an open source system called Drupal.

8. Letting techies control the website content

Partly as a result of companies having no existing knowledge and systems to accommodate online marketing and SEO, those who build the website have by default often become in charge of the content. Letting techies take control of online content is like letting the mechanic drive a F1 racing car. The techie’s job is to deliver the functions you want, and to add the content you need -they're not there to decide what should be on the site.

9. Not doing SEO now

Here’s a simple point; every day you wait means it will be more expensive to get the same results. If you can, get to the top for a collection of keywords – this will give you momentum and help you stay at the top, and it becomes cheaper. Serious search engine success allows for serious business success - put these things together and you’ve basically got a gold rush. If you don’t do the work now it’s going to cost you a fortune to do it in the future. There is a simple reason for this and it’s inbound links. The response is? Start! Learn the process and the pain of learning from your mistakes.

10. Not understanding the importance of site structure and navigation

Any reasonable site for a reasonably sized business is going to need thousands of pages and if you have thousands of pages you need a site structure and an accompanying site navigation that is optimized. Even on a small site it’s possible to get this wrong and waste all your work, which reminds you that you have to get everything working together. You might have wonderfully optimized pages and links but if you don’t have your navigation right or your structure isn’t right then your success will be limited.

What should you do? It’s hard to give a quick answer, but you should organize your site content into channels of related content. Let’s say you had a site selling chocolate - you would have all your Belgian truffles in one place and chocolate cake recipes somewhere else, almost working as different sites.

11. Neglecting your homepage

It is by far your most powerful page because most of your inbound links will come in there. You also need words on your homepage, and your words have to include your target phrases. You can test what works, trying keywords of varying degrees of difficulty and ambition. This comes back to my point of being flexible.

12. Over-relying on your homepage

This is just as problematic. There’s only so far you can go until there comes a point when you have to realize that you need to do well on pages other than your homepage. You have to pass that success on to other pages and if you have developed your channels you will be able to use that success.

Use the power of your homepage to target new niches and use internal links to pass that success on deeper into your site. And of course build deep links direct to the internal pages.