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- Using your keyword list as a meta title. "Dogs, Boarding, Grooming, Pets, Pooches, Kennels, Food" is not a decent meta title because search engines see these as separate keywords. Dog Boarding – Dog Grooming – Dog Kennels is much better.
- Not redirecting the www and non-www versions of your site to the same place. Barrie North blogged about this recently and provided an easy .htaccess hack to avoid this.
- Not checking to see how many pages you have indexed in Google, MSN and Yahoo. This is a simple way to test for potential crawling problems. We had one client recently with 2,000 Google pages, 16,000 in Yahoo and 24 in MSN. Something was amiss.
- Treating headlines as an afterthought. David Ogilvy wrote that once only 20% of people read past the headline of an advertisement, so that you’ve spent 80 cents of your dollar once you’ve written it. This story about Wikipedia made the frontpage of Digg and Reddit on the same day with the headline: "U.S. senator: It’s time to ban Wikipedia in schools, libraries." The story was almost nothing to do with Wikipedia but smart headline writing led to plenty of new traffic.
- Being lulled into a false sense of security by Joomla. "It works right out-of-the-box! I don’t need to worry about extra SEO!" Ron Liskey posted about this attitude on the Joomla! forums with regard to security. Do install an extra SEF URL component. Do consider something like Joomlatwork’s SEF patch. Do use Octagate’s SiteTimer to pinpoint modules, code and images that are slowing your site down. Do use external statistics such as Google Analytics to track your visitors and conversion rates.
- Wasting your site’s link juice with social bookmarking links, technorati tags, RSS Feeds for every component, print and PDF buttons and anything else that is cluttering up your page. Lets face it…..You’re not going to get Dugg. If you’re lucky people may subscribe to ONE of your RSS feeds – the rest are junk. Your Technorati tags are making those guys rich but bleeding your site’s authority away. No-one downloads your pages as a PDF. On the other hand, your visitors and search engines do appreciate clean, uncluttered pages. More signal, less noise as those Web 2.0 folks say.
