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, 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 Belgium 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 home page 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.
About Rachelle Money
Rachelle Money is a freelance journalist based in Scotland, UK. She graduated from the Scottish School of Journalism in 2005 where she was awarded an internship with two national publications - The Sunday Herald newspaper and The Big Issue magazine. Rachelle has been working with Wordtracker since August 2007 and is a regular contributor to the newsletter.
44 comments
Hurrah, at last someone who has grasped the true problems of SEO with both hands!
I am a web designer who plan & build my websites with seo in mind from day one, as a matter of fact, I sometimes plan longer than build. I follow most of these guidelines to the letter and have very high rankings on most of the sites I build for their appropiate keyword requirements.
As Rachelle points out you have to be flexible - structure your seo around your site build and do not follow the seo rules so rigidly.
....at the end of the day it is down to an 'out-of-the-box' attitude and common sense.
Excellent article loaded with truly valuable advice. A terrific help-Thanks!
We wholly embrace and adopt these techniques as part of our daily best practices for our clients.
Thanks for the great summary!
Howard Hale www.quick2m.com
I like this article. A few more fresh concepts than the typical meta tags fluff that gets repeated over and over and over again.
SEO is very basic. It's logic. It should be part of everyone site designer's toolbox.
Someday it will, and we'll have to find another interesting niche.
Not Coordinating SEO With Your Editorial, Sales And Marketing Departments is where a lot of companies go wrong. I provide my clients with an internet marketing solution. There is more to web design than pretty pictures and text. A business should produce a marketing strategy that synchronises the web design and SEO, the advertising and any brochures so that each aspect supports and links to the other giving a unform business image. Businesses should seek a web company that provides an internet marketing solution so all marketing aspects are coordinated and Rachelle's 12 points are not missed. Great article Rachelle.
Hi,
Nice list. I could add quite a few things to it that are common mistakes including allowing duplicate content issues through poor URL structure or failure to canonnicalise, keyword stuffing or other suspicious on-page keyword useage like hidden text and failure to write search engine friendly semantically marked-up code.
But...most important of all is PICK THE RIGHT KEYWORDS, which means identifying keywords that people are actually using to search, so perhaps number 2 on the list might be ammended to stress this bit. If you get this bit wrong, eveyrthing else you do is a waste of time.
Now, if you could just make your external links 'follow' please;)
Rich
We have worked so hard to get good key words for our website. SEO is something you have to work on all the time. It drives us crazy the amount of work it takes to get good search engine results.
www.ispauldead.com
Its great to see someone from the WT camp coming out with a good article AND HAIR! Congrats on both ;)
MediaHost.ie
Fabulous article. Really helpful to focus on the big picture.
Our business is in a very hard field to get good seo listing. We have tried all kind of different things link, video links, links from other websites, keywords and everything else. Just keep working at it is a good plan of attack.
www.quicksetearning.com
Very good article. I do think one sentence is a bit hyperbolic though:
"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."
A site w/ hundreds of pages and thousands of targeted keywords to help a small business?
o.O
Some nice commentary on SEO and obviously a sound strategy...but only if you have extremely deep pockets.
In item #1 on your list on the Big Picture: "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." How is a small business going to afford this? Where will the copy come from?
I have clients with multiple millions in sales and most with much less that don't have the staff or resoruces to generate thousands of pages of copy. How can a retail store or service business or any business with under 20 employees (which accounts for 90% of all US businesses) afford a strategy that includes thousands of page so content and keywords.
The advice is solid for larger firms but make sure that you don't reference "small business" because this kind of strategy ignores reality.
Rachelle, excellent article, concise and numbered as all good articles should be.
If I could be so bold as to suggest something additional which you could actually use yourself - and that is to have back links, on keywords - to your own home page - that would surely help your own SEO.
any well done, thanks, Peter
Great input and advice. I use the google page rank checker to see how each of my key work rich pages on my site are doing.
The main ingredient for SEO is content. Search engines like Google can within milliseconds read and analyze the pages content as they do in adsense. The most important SEO is to make sure all words that go with your targeted keywords are in the content. If a sites subject is about Oak trees then "Oak trees" is the targeted keywords then you would expect words like "branches", "limbs", "leaves" etc. to be in the content.
Hundreds or thousands of pages is a mistake unless your site needs that many pages. If you are doing it just to get up in the Search Engine, then good luck.
Keywords in links to you is also still important. Type "Click Here" into Google and see what comes up. Number one is Adobe Reader - from the millions of sites that put links on saying "Click Here to download Adobe Reader". And if you click the actual page that comes up number 1 , it doesn't say Click Here anywhere in the content. Enough said!
The problem with articles like this is they make sweeping statements without any corroboration.
"Most SEO advice is given for a single page"
Really? I don't know a single professional SEO who doesn't look at the bigger picture and at make an attempt to educate their clients.
Also, The statement "Putting Too Much Trust In An SEO Company". All a statement like this does is server to feed the increasing distrust of the SEO industry (perhaps webland in general). 9/10 people looking for SEO have what I would call a zero effort website. They have approached their web project completely wrong and SEO's are left to pick up the pieces.
There are some good and valid points being made in this article but the sweeping statements devalue the overall piece in my opinion.
d
Too much time. Too much money. Too little results.
That is what SEO means to me.
But I never give up so I will study your article carefully and see if I can glean a few helpful facts.
I thank you, lovely lady! John
Excellent and infomative article Rachelle. I am currently trying to improve my Search Engine rankings by carrying out SEO. One of the main products we sell is Waterford Crystal.
With regard to search terms, I would ideally like the following search terms for Waterford product items - for example.
Waterford Crystal - Ballet Ribbon White Wine Glasses - Pair.
Are they to long?
However, I believe customers may search any combination of those words. E.g. Waterford Crystal white wine glasses - Waterford wine glasses - Waterford Ballet Ribbon wine glasses etc;
Previously I had - Ballet Ribbon White Wine - Pair. You see all would be relevant. So the Waterford page would have the relevant search terms in the title and meta tags, as well as in the page content. As you have just suggested.
The new Title - Meta Tag will be:- Gifts Are Us At - Waterford Crystal - Ballet Ribbon White Wine Glasses - Pair - To long though!!!!! Is it?
I would assume Waterford Crystal is already in there as a 'Main Category' in my Shop Admin page. That is why, if I had to reduce my title tag, then probably Waterford Crystal would be the best to come out. What does anybodt out there think?
Reference links: Currently I have about 230 links and would be only to happy to get even more if things would improve.
Best wishes Dave Badcock Harvey Weston - Gifts Are Us
This is it! No stone is unturned. Absolutely must read article for everyone interested in SEO.
Annie & Andrew: I think you're right that creating so much content is a challenge. But it can be done and Wordtracker has plans to show you how, including an upcoming ebook from our own Rachelle Money.
Even a mom and pop business can soon have thousands of pages on their website.
For example, a page a day from one person will give you over 300 in a year and if they have been extensively and usefully categorized you might have a few hundred more.
Just as important is the math that takes us to the need to target so many keywords and create so much content. Try looking at the following metrics on your own sites' stats:
No. of visits made with keyword searches (preferably excluding those that are not variations on your brand name/s).
No. of different keywords used for those searches. (At this point most people's jaws drop as they see that the number of different keywords used is from 30-50% of the number of visits. Eg (copied from a stats report from one of my own sites' stats reports):
--- "Search sent 398,318 total visits via 158,984 keywords"
No. of pages on site.
Sales and profit from site.
From those figures you can make a useful extrapolation of how many keywords you need to be successful for and how many pages you might need to make the profit you need.
There must be many exceptions to this but I haven't yet worked on a site that didn't need at least hundreds of pages targeting thousands of keywords IF it was to support even a one-person business.
We are going to publish some articles that go into this in more detail - showing why it is the case and how even small businesses really can do it.
Peter (Irish Marketing Consultant): I'm all for 'bold' and in the spirit of your advice I will add some internal text links to this article when I've added some new and very relevant pages about the big subjects raised here.
Dave Robinson: Sorry. To be clearer I should have said 'most published SEO advice'. I didn't mean SEO pros talking to their clients. On "Putting Too Much Trust In An SEO Company" I have to call it how I see it and I see people trusting SEO companies that are delivering poor service. Please note I speak as an owner of an SEO company myself and I know that many of us deliver great value and make millionaires of our clients. I would happily add to my list: 'not getting help from a proven SEO company'.
I think you're right about articles like this being full of "sweeping statements without any corroboration" but the trouble is that if you qualify and corroborate everything you write and say (and this was an interview) then you wouldn't get past the first point and it would be unreadable.
However, I'm aware there are some big issues raised here (see Annie's and andrew allen's comments) and I will be writing some articles to back up those points with details and real life examples and stats.
So stick around, stay critical and keep the tough questions coming.
http://www.l-o-f-t-s.co.uk great stuff please keep this news letter content intresting as it is
Thanks for the common sense information. Once I got a good content management system, I was able to add pages very quickly and make changes as needed using an admin person. This has made a big difference. Using Friendly URL's title tags and page description tags on each page has gone a long way too.
Thanks.
Mark:
What small business owner (most of which do not have extensive experience w/ SEO) is going to be able to effectively manage hundreds of Web pages that target thousands of keywords? In fact, I would contend it's pretty much impossible for any business that could not afford a dedicated SEO team to effectively "target" thousands of keywords. It's just not realistic ... or necessary.
I'm in the process of optimizing two sites now that have more than 2000 pages of non-optimized content, and it's no small task. Far better to have a smaller site that's highly targeted with a reasonable number of keywords and keyword phrases. I think that's a more feasible goal for most small businesses.
Other than that, great points! :)
Rachelle, excellent article
Ciao
Annie: I think that creating hundreds of pages can seem daunting but in practice, with a little advice, it should be easy for most sites.
I think any small business owner can do the required writing, eg a page a day. So the job becomes what to write about. That depends on your site but here's one method from Ken McGaffin: reading a newspaper.
You rightly question the possibility of optimizing so many pages for thousands of keywords. I'm going to expand on this with an article (perhaps a number of them) but briefly the answer is to:
The big job is often the planning of your site content and structure and this comes close to your point about being able to "effectively manage hundreds of Web pages that target thousands of keywords". I think managing them is easy if your plan is sound. But planning them is hard.
This is all very brief but i will expand on this.
Here's another metric to look for on your site stats if your site is 'doing ok', (however you define that): Take one page, not a home page and see how many different visits it's had and keywords were searched with for those visits. Eg from one of my own sites:
The page is: http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/management/strategy-tactics.php
Primary target keywords: Strategy and Tactics
No. of keywords successfully targeted: at least 1,500
Time to SEO the page: less than 5 minutes
SEO work on main body text: none
From Google Analytics: "This page was viewed 6,048 times via 1,574 keywords"
So that's over 1,500 keywords targeted with one page and 5 minutes of on-page SEO work. The real work was in:
By adopting mark nunney's seo experties, i am seeing that my alexa ranking is going to be better day by day and also getting organic traffic from google, yahoo & msn. I recommend to adopt.
Nice article. Yers, there are some sweeping comments and Mark has already clarified but comments like this must be taken with a pinch od salt.
I firmly believe that most of the businesses can do well with a basic SEO policy, decent onsite improvements and a few good links from industry relevant big players, portals and directories. Add regularly added content (think blogs) and you can be a market leader in your niche. Those in competitive industries do need a much more focussed approach.
One of the big problems I have noticed is that people get their web sites developed by web designers, not marketers. So the sites have all the latest bells and whistles but not enough quality content and conversion elements.
That's good advice. We'll be sure to follow it and let you know what happens.
Very nice and concise help.
I like this the best: "If you can, get to the top for a collection of keywords – this will give you momentum and help you stay at the top."
Thanks! Kari
I appreciate this article. It is a very good place for a person to start, when they pick up the idea of SEO. I do feel like your spamming approach of making hundreds of pages is a bit archaic for the sophisticated algorithm that Google is currently running.
What I do think is very important when embarking on SEO on a site that already exists, is planning and strategy. You make a very good point about coordinating with the marketing, editorial, and sales departments. Also if you are doing SEO on a site that already has traffic, study that traffic first, and enhance that traffic before making broad changes. See what works and remember, that sometimes a small change can make a huge difference, both good and bad.
Ji Cecil seohollywood.com
Mark stresses the importance of an SEO friendly content management system and uses Drupal himself. I am considering the Joomla CMS for an upcoming project and was wondering if this is an SEO friendly system. I would appreciate any comments.
Thanks
Ji Cecil: I recommend making hundreds (preferably thousands) of pages with relevant content. No spam required.
Peter Cox: I can't comment on Joomla because I haven't used it. I will try and write an article about the CMS features I think you want. Quickly now, they include: on all pages including 'category pages': page-level control of URL, page title, other metadata and body copy. Having this for category pages is where CMSs often struggle.
Thanks for Keeping this Wealth of Information coming . Very Helpful in this ever changing internet business climate. Interesting that No matter how great your site is - It's meaningless unless your SEO is on target. Obviously - with good SEO and an average site you'ld do better than a Spectacular site which not many are driven to. Yes - Rachelle Money is a Money Maker. Keep it up.
That's a nice article. I think a good follow up would be an article on the ROI of integrating a content development strategy into your business processes. You could cover the costs, and returns, of developing content yourself, as well as the costs associated with outsourcing content development.
Ji Cecil: You've been reading to many Black Hat forums to immediately jump to the conclusion that Mark is endorsing spam. There is no reason that a small business can't invest 1 hour a day to create 2 brief industry/service/product specific articles per day that discuss their business perspective on that issue. My own experience is that for each article I write (usually 200 to 300 words) I will get about 2 unique visitors per day. This means that if I write 2 articles a day, and do nothing on weekends, I can increase my traffic at minimum by 500 unique visitors per day after one year. Depending on your busines, 500+ daily unique visitors may totally change your business, or as you begin to see the rewards of writing, you may start writing even more. Regardless, spammers typically put up 100,000's of pages in one hour, not hundreds of pages over the span of months.
Well done, concise and authoritative. Internet marketing is like life it is not a destination but rather a journey - each day resents new challenges and opportunities. How we respond is the only thing that makes change happen.
Hi,
I totally agree with your comment about CMS. I failed miserably with five sites where the CMS was great from a technical point of view but just not SEO friendly. Each site was able to generate hundreds of pages but none of the deeper pages were ever picked up by search engines. Result: I invested a lot of money for very little ROI. Get the CMS right first time in terms of SEO and you'll be feeling a lot happier than I did after a few months when I had to ditch all five projects. I've learnt from these mistakes but it was a painful experience... Are there any alternatives to drupal by the way?
Thanks.
Ian: I wish I could give you list of SEO-friendly CMSs but other than Drupal I haven't used any others for long enough. I've used plenty of in-house CMSs built by my clients and I'd like to say that they were all wonderful.
The science of SEO is always fascinating. It's feels good to here other experts in the field speak of the same challenges. Excellent search engine marketing article! Cheers.
In Item #10 "Not Understanding The Importance Of Site Structure And Navigation"
you suggest that "...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 Belgium truffles in one place and chocolate cake recipes somewhere else, almost working as different sites."
It may be worth testing, to see what happens if you actually do put each "channel of content" in a different site, and provide appropriate navigation between them all and to the main website.
To the people above wondering how a small business can possible afford to have hundreds or thousands of pages. Many sites are now being created dynamically, this makes it easy to make thousands and thousands of pages. For example you can create variables to hold different parts of a page, such as a variable to hold a description of an item for sale, you could even have a field for the person to add keywords that are relevant to that item, upload a picture, whatever, then create a function that takes the variables and creates the pages when the form is submitted If you create a site with a simple user interface that is pretty much just a simple form for an employee, ect. to fill out, and upload pics of a producet and descriptions you can use that info to dynamically generate pages.
Thanks for this useful article, which, along with some really helpful comments in others' feedback, has given us lots of ideas.
Microsite Networks: Of course, you suggest an interesting test. There are some things you know, inc: there will be more 'overheads' running multiple sites; you'll likely lose a bit of brand identity with the multiple sites.