Search Engine Optimization

No matter how effective your SEO campaign is, your site isn’t going to rank well if its design isn’t search engine-friendly. And a flashy, attractive website that wows users isn’t going to do you much good if users can’t find it. That’s why designing your website while keeping SEO in mind is so important. If you want to build a website that is search-friendly and user-friendly, avoid these 10 web design mistakes.

1. Optimizing your website AFTER it’s been designed

If you want there to be synergy between your website’s design and SEO, be sure to optimize your site as you design it.

2. Creating a static website

Websites aren’t business cards, so don’t design a static website that will be buried in the search results. Update your website’s content on a regular basis to improve your site’s ranking. The search engines love sites that constantly publish fresh content.

3. Only using Flash

Search engine spiders cannot crawl Flash content, so be sure that your website isn’t designed only with Flash. You can create both Flash and HTML versions of your site so that the content is fully crawl-able by search engine spiders.

4. Not optimizing URL structure

While your website is being designed, plan the URL structure of each page of your site. Optimal URLs contain target keywords, don’t contain numbers, and don’t have too many parameters or levels.

5. Overusing images

Are there pages of your website that are made up entirely of images? Search engine spiders cannot crawl images, so try to keep image use to a minimum.

6. Underusing alt image tags

While you shouldn’t go overboard with images on your website, that doesn’t mean you should avoid using them altogether because they do improve your website’s user experience and appearance. Just keep in mind that search engine spiders cannot determine what an image is and index it unless you use alt tags to tell the search engines what your images are about. Alt tags should contain the target keyword so that when people search for relevant terms online, they come across your website in the results.

7. Using blocks of text

People who read content online have short attention spans and respond best to content that can be scanned easily. While including blocks of text on your website isn’t necessarily bad for SEO, it is bad for usability because it overwhelms visitors and causes them to click away from your site. If you want to encourage people to stick around, use short paragraphs and break up your content with sub-headings and bullet points.

8. Using “Click Here” anchor text

Want to rank well for the keyword, “Click here”? You probably could care less about ranking for this term, so whenever you link to an internal page of your website, be sure to use anchor text that contains the target keyword phrase and passes on some link juice.

9. Not using title tags and meta descriptions

Web designers are notorious for using title tags and meta description tags ineffectively or not using them at all. To improve your website’s on-page SEO, make sure each page has a unique title tag and meta description. Your website’s title tags and meta descriptions should contain target keywords and be written in a way that encourages people to click through when they see your site listed in the search results.

10. Using a splash page

A splash page is a page that features a banner that says something like, “Click here to enter.” Splash pages are bad for both usability and SEO because they complicate your website’s structure, don’t contain text (which is what search engine spiders are looking for), and waste your website visitors’ time.

This is by no means a complete list of web design mistakes that affect SEO, but it’s a good start. Avoid these common mistakes and you’ll be well on your way to designing a site that’s optimized for both humans and search engines.

JCPenney, one of America’s biggest retailers, consistently ranked number one on Google for all keywords related to the range of products it sells, including dresses, area rugs, and bedding. For several months, JCPenney’s suspiciously high rankings went unnoticed, till just recently, that is.

With the investigative help of an SEO professional, the New York Times discovered that JCPenney was buying links in order to boost its rankings. The links had keyword-rich anchor text and were mostly found on topically irrelevant, low authority sites. For example, a link to JCPenney’s site with the anchor text, “black dresses,” was found on a website about engineering.

JCPenney claimed that they had no idea what their SEO firm was up to. They immediately fired the firm and took down the links after news of their less-than-ethical SEO campaign went public, but Google’s Matt Cutts took disciplinary action immediately. JCPenney’s website was subsequently buried and can no longer be found on the first page of Google when you search for product-related keywords it ranked #1 for just last week.

What is the lesson here? Most people would say, “Don’t buy links because you could get banned from the search engines.” Nevertheless, many SEO professionals continue to buy links and engage in other “black hat” SEO tactics in secret, despite the fact that their clients’ websites could disappear from Google at the blink of an eye if they were to get caught. Most of these SEO firms probably don’t care because they think they’ll get away with it. After all, like JCPenney, they only buy links from small, lesser known sites. Who would ever find out about it, unless you’re the subject of a New York Times article?

Why Buying Links Is a Bad Idea

While engaging in black hat SEO and buying links is not illegal, it is clearly against Google’s policies. And for a business that generates the majority of its leads and sales via the internet, getting de-indexed from Google is a significant blow.

Nonetheless, websites in several industries have resorted to buying links simply because it’s difficult to attract links organically in their niches. For example, a website in the Payday loan industry will inevitably have more difficulty attracting natural links than a website about makeup. There are plenty of bloggers and webmasters that publish content about makeup, so they voluntarily link to great content about makeup… but payday loans? It’s not exactly a popular niche among the linkerati. Therefore, buying links has become the elephant in the room in the SEO industry. Tons of people are doing it, but few people will talk about it in public. But if you want to avoid Google’s wrath, do yourself a favor and play by the rules. Buying links is risky business and could get your site banned by Google.

So, you’re probably wondering how else you can build links. Here are a few ethical alternatives that work:

• Experiment with viral marketing. For example, Blendtec sells blenders, which is something people normally don’t talk about in social media, but Blendtec managed to attract tons of links via social media through viral video marketing.
• Ask for links or exchange links. Publish excellent content and then kindly ask other webmasters in your industry for a link or link exchange. If you publish helpful, informative content that would be beneficial to a webmaster’s readers, he may consider linking to your site, as long as you aren’t a direct competitor.
• Buy links from a reputable directory. Google doesn’t look down on all paid links. In fact, buying a link from reputable sites like the Yahoo! Directory is acceptable in Google’s eyes. Why? Yahoo! Directory has a strong editorial policy, so even if you pay their fee and submit your site, there’s no guarantee that they’ll link to it.

The backlinks that Google values most are on relevant websites that receive significant traffic, so keep that in mind when you’re asking around for links. And remember: don’t approach a webmaster you don’t know with a link request out of the blue. Connect with the webmaster via social media, email, or telephone and build rapport with him first. He’s more likely to be receptive to your link request if you make the effort to get to know him before asking for favors.

Developing a successful SEO strategy for a new website is challenging because there is no data available to work from. When you launch a new site, the easiest way to create data that can help you build a successful SEO campaign is by using PPC. PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, helps you figure out which keyword phrases would work best for your site.

Remember: one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make for your website is deciding which keyword phrases to target. Even if you conduct keyword research to find popular keyword phrases that are relevant to your niche, you may discover that the keywords you uncovered simply don’t convert.

Many businesses make the mistake of targeting search terms with a high volume of traffic, only to realize that those keywords aren’t bringing them results. More often than not, the keywords that convert best are not the most competitive ones, but the ones that receive less overall traffic but traffic of higher quality. Many businesses also make the mistake of copying their competitors’ keywords, which usually aren’t equally effective on their sites.

Why Testing Is So Important

Don’t make the mistake of spending lots of time and money trying to rank for a keyword just because you think it would be lucrative based on its search volume. Actually test it out in a PPC campaign first to see how well it performs. What’s the point of making the effort to rank number one for a term that doesn’t even bring you high quality traffic?

PPC is a reliable, cost-effective way to determine exactly which keywords will produce the right results for your business so you can work smarter, not harder. Running a PPC campaign will help you figure out which keywords convert the best for you. You’d be surprised to discover that conversion rates for a keyword in a single industry can vary significantly depending on a site’s design, content, and a variety of other factors.

How to Make Your PPC Campaign Worthwhile

For PPC testing to be worthwhile, you need to ensure that the proper tracking system is in place. You can set up AdWords conversion tracking, which follows customers from the moment they conduct a search and click on your PPC ad to the moment they complete a transaction on your website. When you utilize tracking, you’ll figure out not only which keywords receive a high volume of traffic, but also which keywords help you generate the most leads and sales.

An added perk of launching a PPC campaign for a new website is that you can immediately start driving traffic to your website. It can take several weeks, if not months, to improve your site’s search engine ranking, so in the meantime, you can use PPC to target your preferred keywords and drive traffic to your site instantly.

If you already have an established website, use your analytics program to determine which keywords convert the best. A particularly effective way to spot lucrative keywords is by using goal tracking. With goal tracking, you’ll be able to identify the terms that are worth targeting in your SEO campaign.