Not one for the purists I know, but these are some common mistakes made by professional optimisers and consultants. Feel free to add to the list:
1. Over Linking – Link building is a core method of search engine optimisation and possibly the most crucial, but Google is too clever to let you go and get 500 high pagerank links, your link profile must appear natural. High authority links are good if they add value to the page where the link to your site is to be situated. If the link appears on a page with tonnes of other external links this will stand out a mile to the crawlers and limit your opportunity for organic success.
2. Keyword Heavy Content – Many people are convinced Google works to a set keyword density, this has always been a guide for keyword repetition and many other factors influence the way Google discovers what your page is about. The best advice is to put yourself in the shoes of a searcher of your target keyword, then write it from what you think they would be looking for and don’t even be concerned with keyword density.
3. Duplicate/Old Content – A good way to find out if your content is still relevant is by searching a complete paragraph in Google, if you rank top then the content and page are being crawled perfect, if you don’t appear the chances are your copy has been duplicated by another site or become stale due to lack of changes. This is the time for a complete rewrite.
4. JavaScript/Flash navigation – The navigation on your website should be considered the spine of the site. Flash navigation, and to some degree JavaScript navigation will stop this from functioning. The web is built around links and this kind of navigation will therefore be road blocking your site. Convert to HTML and the search engines will at least be able to read the pages on your site, even if they don’t rank them.
5. Hosting/Domain Extension Targeting – If your target search engine is specific to a country then this should be reflected in the hosting and domain extension. Google takes a lot of bearing from this information in order to provide the most relevant local results, so a webmaster should do so accordingly.
Hope these go some way to identifying some of your potential ranking problems.
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Posted by Nick.
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