Create, Capture, Convert

SEO For Business #3: 2 Big SEO Mistakes Which May Hurt Your Rankings

A business website is more than just a collection of pages in cyberspace that highlights your products and services. It’s also a promotional tool that works to gain attention for your business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is the easiest online contact that a person searching for what you offer is going to have with your company. Maybe you have spent good money having your website designed and it looks spiffy. However, you have noticed that it isn’t producing the kind of visitors you thought it would.

Why not?

Well, the usual answer is that many people simply cannot find your site. As you learned earlier, each website page is assigned a specific ranking by the search engines. First page rankings are the most desired, because they attract the majority of surf traffic. But, unfortunately, most websites are not going to be able to claim one of those coveted spots on their own. Your website pages may be lingering way back in the crowd on page 10 or 27 or 52. If this is the case, there is no way that it will attract the kind of premium traffic filled with buyers who are ready to spend their money.

2 Major SEO Mistakes

There are two major reasons why your site is receiving such bad rankings: Poor Indexing and Lack of Targeted Content.

Poor Indexing

As you have learned, search engine spiders will visit your website and crawl its pages looking for relevant information. Due to the fact that this is an automated process, there are things that can literally trip up a spider and cause it to not be able to pull the information it needs from a page to determine what your website is actually about in order to produce a suitable ranking.

For instance, website pages containing popular elements such as Flash, Java applets, Frames, as well as photos, images, audio or video that aren’t keyword optimized contain content that cannot be processed by search engine spiders, and therefore make determining the theme of your pages very difficult.  Be sure to optimize all image “alt tags” with your target keywords, use Flash sparingly only as added effect, and give a keyword rich text description for any audio or video on the page.

Inadequate linking is another problem. Your indexed pages may have links to a few inner pages, but may have skipped linking to a large portion of your site. When a spider visits a particular page, it is also crawling any pages that are linked to that page. This type of “deep internal linking” is essential in order to make sure that all of your site pages can be found online.  A good way to tackle this issue is to have your webmaster create an xml-sitemap that has links to all of your pages and place it in the footer of all the pages on your website.  Also create a Google webmaster tools account to monitor how search engine spiders are indexing your content.

Lack of Targeted Content

The average person is going to type in the search phrase that is most important to them. They only want to look at sites that are most targeted to their search query. If the content on your pages is not specifically optimized for the keyword being searched for or is too general in nature, the search engines may deem your site as not important enough for a top ranking.  Be sure to create separate pages for the terms you want to rank for and optimize your tags and content specifically for those phrases.

SEO Marketing to the Rescue

A well thought out SEO marketing strategy can help you map out necessary changes to your site pages that instantly makes them more attractive to search engines. This includes making sure your website has a good internal linking structure in place and including an xml-sitemap in your footer.

It also includes doing a thorough evaluation of your site content, and sprucing up any weak spots by creating content that includes popular terms being searched for by your ideal customer.