Darren Franks - August 31, 2010
Many junior SEOs or web developers may think they know SEO, but the truth is they actually don’t. Here are 10 rookie SEO mistakes that seem to be quite frequent:
- Inaccurate Keyword Targeting: This can be a big slip-up for most people that are new to SEO. They forget to do the proper research or any at all!
- Duplicate Content: Comes in many forms (other domains owned by website with exact content, lack of canonicalization, URL parameter changes etc.).
- Poor Title Tags: Title tags are the most important of the meta tags (they are weighted highly by the search engines). They are either too long, too short, duplicated or are missing completely.
- Navigation isn’t Crawlable: JavaScript or Flash based navigation is problematic to search engines.
- Robots.txt File. Simple text file placed at the root of the domain, it tells the search engine spiders which parts of the site to index and which to skip. Sometimes incorrectly implemented or omitted completely.
- URL Structure. Generally speaking, a good URL consists of as few parameters as possible, along with good keyword elements.
- Lazy Link Building: Too few backlinks from “hub” or authority sites and too many outbound links to low quality or irrelevant websites.
- Internal Site Map: Important for two reasons; for the spiders to find pages they wouldn’t be able to get to otherwise and for user experience.
- Fresh Content. This is often overlooked. New content added to a site will get the spiders to return and index more often (it’s good for user experience too!).
- Footer Navigation: Gives the spider another place to get to the important pages on the site and, again, is good for user experience.
