13 SEO Fails, Summed Up By Cat GIFs

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I have seen so many blogs telling us how not to kill our sites using optimisation techniques but none of them included enough Cats? Inspired by Hug Your Cat Day, I thought it was about time a list of SEO No-No’s was accompanied by cat related Graphics Interchange Formats, also known as a “GIFs”.

So be prepared to mix SEO education and cats, one GIF at a time:

1. Failure to Keep Up With Trends

Keeping up-to-date with recent changes to Google’s algorithms and the best advice of reputable SEO information sources is crucial for success. Conveniently I have written a post where you can find a list of these sources here: 20 Blogs To Blow Your Digital Socks Off

2. Ignoring The Long Tail

The long tail keywords are those made up of a string of keywords or a phrase that tend to have less traffic potential per keyword, but the combined search volume for them is actually much larger, more valuable and less competitive than many core keywords. Find these terms and ensure your site’s content matched the query or requirements of those searches.

3. Creating Duplicate Content

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Whilst article marketing still has its place in the SEO world, “article spinning” has long since died a death. In fact Google now penalises this type of duplicate content. Guest blogging is on Google’s radar but does still offer a way to build up your reputation and backlinks using useful and completely unique content.

4. Acquiring Spammy Links

Despite all the penalties and warnings from Google spammy links are still being acquired. In fact small numbers of organically achieved backlinks from high authority sites are worth more than any number of spammy links from low quality sites.

5. Not Knowing Your Audience

Good SEO always begins with a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what they’re doing online.  Getting to know your ideal online customers on an intimate and personal basis is key to selecting the appropriate keywords to target and the right SEO techniques to meet your KPI’s.

6. Using An SEO Unfriendly CMS

A non-SEO friendly CMS (Content Management System) makes it nearly impossible to achieve your SEO goals, so put in the research before choosing one. At the very least, source a CMS that allows you to embed analytics tracking code anywhere you need it and to customise the following:

  • Meta title and description fields,
  • Heading styling,
  • Page URLs for all pages,
  • Image ALT tags

7. Narrow Site Architecture

Many businesses fail to develop a website architecture that is SEO-friendly because they are strategic direction is coming from management teams who know nothing about SEO. When developing your site architecture plan, please consider your SEO goals.

8. Infinite Scroll

A web-page utilising infinite scroll will by default serve the search engine spider the first page of results and nothing more. This means that lots of great content may never be seen by a search engine if there is no other mechanism in place to serve as a path to that content. Rendering the content using AJAX crawling is one way to alleviate SEO concerns.

9. Keyword Stuffing

This involves finding the keywords you want to target and jamming your web pages full of frequent mentions and anchor text links. This practice is a no-no because Google will soon find you and hand over a penalty. On top of that, your clued up visitors are going to know what you’re up to and discount the value of your content/site.

10. Invisible Keywords

A very old school black hat technique where the webmaster adds lots of keywords they want to target in a colour that matches the background. Thereby making them invisible to the user but scraped by the search engines. Not something I would recommend!

11. Uncrawlable Site

Make sure your site is searchable by the search engine bots.  Your navigation elements should all use search engine friendly code and all pages should be easy to find for users and spider bots.  The following should all be on your crawlability checklist:

  • Review your 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools,
  • Have your sitemap submitted and accessible from the footer,
  • Check your robots.txt file is not preventing anything you want cached.

12. Not Tracking Data

Actually a lot more common than you might think. Not utilising tracking tools like Google Analytics renders your SEO efforts useless if you cannot track their effects on your site and KPI’s. It’s the equivalent of driving a car without the rear view mirror.

13. Lack of Patience

Remember SEO is a long term strategy. If you want quick returns then invest in PPC or Display advertising. Unfortunately, SEO results don’t happen overnight but keep pushing up to date best practice techniques on your site and being creative and you will reap the rewards.

 

DISCLAIMER: No cats were harmed in the making of this blog, just their egos!

Title grumpy cat image source

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On June 4, 2014
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