In an article published in the SEO-News newsletter this morning, Kanga Internet’s Chris Diprose details 10 of the most common SEO mistakes that you’re bound to make on your website. Whether or not the mistakes are done on purpose, are done because of a lack of SEO knowledge, or you had someone else build your site - these SEO mistakes should be avoided. Some of the mistakes that Chris mentions were covered back in January, when we published our “Common SEO Blunders… Must read for web designers” post.

If you find that you’re guilty of any of these mistakes, take the action now to correct them so you can start improving your search engine rankings.

Here are Chris’ Top 10 SEO Mistakes:

1. Bad Titles
2. Filename of the Page
3. Duplicate or Bad Content
4. No Links
5. Incoming Link Anchor Text
6. Bad Internal Page Links
7. Live Links
8. Impatience
9. Keyword Selection
10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing

I certainly don’t have any objections to the list that Chris prepared. I might rank Impatience (#8) higher on the list, only because becoming impatient with your SEO can lead to more problems down the road. You’re more likely to try an SEO tactic that’s untested or engage in some type of questionable SEO practice if you don’t plan out your strategy properly and if you don’t give it time to work.

1. Bad Titles
A survey of top SEO professonals on SEOMoz.org a couple months ago ranked the Title tag as the most important aspect of SEO, so it only makes sense that bad titles are probably the worst mistake you can make when optimizing your website.

2. Filename of Pages
This one is a little off-base, at least in naming the mistake. This should be URL structure or “dynamic URLs vs. static URLs”. Certainly, having a site with long, dynamic URLs is a problem. Use Mod_rewrite or the Windows equivalent to rewrite your URLs to be more friendly. This is not a necessity unless your URLs have more than 2-3 variables on the query string in my opinion. We’ve had plenty of experience and success w/ single variable query string URLs.

3. Duplicate Content
We’ve covered this topic several times in the past and it’s probably one of the hardest mistakes to effectively communicate to site owners and content managers. They just don’t see the value of writing unique content for their products or their stores, when they can get a completed data feed from the manufacturer and plop it right into the site… unfortunately, that just won’t yield any long-term results.

4. No Links
This is a no-brainer… a site cannot rank on content alone.  Every website should have an ongoing backlink strategy.

5. Incoming Anchor Link Text
See previous mistake… Just make sure your backlinks use keywords.  Many site owners and marketers will try to use the company’s name and/or just the domain name as the anchor text.  This is much less effective than using keyword-rich anchor text on all backlinks.  Be sure to vary the keywords also - your incoming links (backlinks) shouldn’t all be the same. 

6. Bad Internal Page Links
A site w/ poor navigation or linking structure will struggle to compete with sites who have good navigation and structure.  Be sure to categorize your pages properly and to use keywords in the anchor text.  Another common problem w/ internal page links is the use of images for navigation instead of text - always go w/ text unless you already have a full text menu elsewhere on the page.

7. Live Links
Broken links hurt… check your site frequently to make sure you’re links aren’t broken.  If you find broken links, fix them ASAP.  Setup a custom 404 error page if you have pages that no longer exist and if you can’t get the links changed (from backlinks for example).

8. Impatience
This can kill an SEO campaign.  Do the work and use the methods that have been proven to work over time.  Allow sufficient time for all the work you’ve done to take affect (several months).

9. Keyword Selection
Selecting the wrong keywords is almost as bad as not selecting keywords at all.  Be sure that you’re optimizing for the keywords your target audience is using, not the keywords you think they are (yes, there is usually a difference).  Use keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or Google Trends to find out what your visitors are using, what’s most popular, and what keywords are slowly fading into oblivion.

10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing
This is just plain dumb… Your website shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords you are targeting, let alone keywords you’re not (that’s a whole other story).  Common keyword stuffing takes place in site footers, comment tags, meta tags or other typically hidden areas of the site and/or the HTML coding itself.

Interview snippets from Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Tools. Full video interview w/ Rand Fishkin

I’ve tried to get the important points from the interview, so several of these items are very short and/or are specific statements made by Google’s Vanessa Fox.

Sitemaps.org initiatives

• Sitemaps.org content to be included in 18 different languages.
• New method of notification - specify in robots.txt file via:
  sitemap:filepath

  View the robots.txt sitemap inclusion discussion over at WebmasterWorld for more specifics

Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

• Yahoo Site Explorer out of Beta.
• URL removal tool in Google (out fo 6 yrs now). Could make it’s way into Webmaster Tools.
• Real-time Google PageRank coming soon? Doesn’t sound like it (too many privacy issues).
• Google Supplemental Results - could start providing more information on why pages are in the Supplemental Index, but likely wouldn’t provide a full list of everything in the index. Not considered such a bad thing anymore - many supplemental results still rank well for specific phrases.
• Considering offering data on who’s linking to your 404 error pages and/or where your broken links are being linked from. Always try to redirect to the most relevant page on the site vs. using a 404.
• Could submitting an orphan page through Sitemaps get a page indexed?
  Yes… (but) it probably wouldn’t rank well. That means that all of the pages on a site should be submitted through Sitemaps.
• Google Link Reporting - Link sorting (currently alphabetized).
  Could make other options available in the future.
• Sounds like they could be adding features to allow you to verify more than one domain within your account (ie: multiple domains).
• Moving your website to another domain - Take pages from old site, move to new site (as is). Don’t restructure or re-design the website until after you’re sure the engines see the new domain & pages well. “Do things in stages” or “one step at a time”.

Pre-Sell Pages (ie: .edu hosted content)

• They’re aware of what’s going on and could devalue some of the trust that certain domains have (ie: .edu, .gov). “Always looking for ways to do things better.” Hoping to get some changes in the hopper and to see some changes soon.One example given was searching for “viagra” in Google - several of the Top 10 results are .edu sites that appear to have had content hosted on them. Several of the pages have custom 404 error pages coming up, so they must have figured out what was going on. Another appears to be forum/comment spam that’s somehow ranked well (???).

Buying Links (watch out!)

• Might make webmasters aware of detection of paid links (ouch!!!). The more information the better, including problems regarding ranking issues. No definitive answer though….

Sites Displaying Search Results (scrapers, shopping sites, etc.)

• She mentioned that the engines, in some cases, wouldn’t want visitors searching in Google to click a result, only to find another page of search results. I guess some filters could be expected.

Google Base

• Submit structured data (ie: feeds).
• Separate searching system from Google.com.
• Good for experimenting - “get in early”.

Google News

• Can submit News sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
• Send email to get included (for review) - English only.

In case you missed our last Vanessa Fox posting, you can view her December 2006 interview here.

Yahoo has finally wised up and implemented support for a new Meta robots tag that will allow you to “opt-out” from having your Yahoo! Directory title and description show up in the search results.

The tag is called “NOYDIR” or No Yahoo Directory, and can be used as follows:

meta name=”robots” content=”NOYDIR”

or the less common

meta name=”slurp” content=”NOYDIR”

The 2nd tag being specifically for Yahoo’s spider “Slurp“.

This is great news for site owners who feel like they’ve been handcuffed by the Yahoo! Directory editors and their minimally optimized directory listings.

Site Reference has a good article about “Optimizing for MSN: Is it worth the effort?”.  In short, yes it’s worth it.

While there’s no argument about the higher quality of results that Google provides, MSN is still a valuable search engine when it comes to getting visitors that are going to purchase something from you or fill out your lead form.

The article makes a few points about what makes MSN’s results different from Google’s:

What about MSN? In this case, things tend to be a little smoother. MSN seems to really like new pages, and it has no sandbox. It doesn’t use an “age filter” and classifies sites much faster. Therefore, it is highly probable that the amount of results that a Web user might get for a given search to be significantly higher than the one obtained from Google. Also, it appears that the search speed is higher with MSN than with Google. This may be because their index is considerably smaller than Google’s.

The biggest difference between the two engines is obviously the sandbox effect and the fact that MSN’s Live Search tends to rank newer or recently updated pages more favorably. Not to mention they pick up your incoming links a lot quicker and calculate the link weight in their algorithm much faster.

Ok, so that doesn’t explain the issue of getting visitors to buy from you or to contact you for services.  They go on to detail that the conversion rates for MSN are much higher than from Google. It’s believed that Google users are more prone to looking at many sites very quickly, while MSN users are likely to stay and complete a desired action for you.

Reports show that Google is already a saturated search engine. Its users see so many websites that they don’t have the patience to spend much time on any given site, but still want to visit others as quickly as possible. On the other hand, it appears that MSN users are more likely to produce conversions (sales). This probability is 48% higher for MSN users than for any other Internet users.

Based on this information, optimizing for MSN is very important to any business.  Unfortunately, the same optimization strategies that you use for Google or Yahoo may not help you in MSN. 

Here are some of the key strategies to improving your MSN rankings:

• Create a large site, full of valuable, well organized, and resourceful content.
• MSN is a little more vulnerable to higher keyword density; be careful about increasing yours, however, because Google is adept at identifying spam (& possibly applying a penalty).
• MSN is more vulnerable to quantity (spamming) than the other engines, since they tend to count new pages & links more quickly. This is a pretty easy concept - add a lot of links, move up in MSN.
• Ensure you site is clean, coding-wise.
• Have a well optimized Title tag

While it might seem like a good idea to start doing all these things to optimize your site for MSN, keep in mind that some of these strategies could get you in trouble in the others (Google & Yahoo).

Additional resources on MSN optimization:
http://www.seochat.com/c/b/MSN-Optimization-Help/
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4691
http://ezinearticles.com/?MSN-Optimization-at-a-Glance&id=142141
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum97/240.htm

The two biggest stories the past few weeks related to internet marketing and SEO are probably the new tools that Google and Yahoo both rolled out.

Google unveils more links
Within your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can now view/download a much larger scope of incoming links to your website.  In addition, you can view the links to specific pages on your site and generate an outgoing link report as well.  Here’s the official word from Vanessa Fox over at GWT:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information. Read the full story

I’ve tested the new link reports out and it doesn’t give you too much information that you probably don’t already have.  In addition, Matt Cutts stated that the reports are by no means 100% of the data available and don’t reflect the true number of links pointing to your site.  He also stated that just because a link is showing up in the report, that it’s not an indicator that the link is counted in the algorithm - it’s a simple report of the links, nothing more.

Yahoo Pipes unveiled
The general scope of “Yahoo Pipes” is the ability to combine RSS/feeds (or mash them together), and then manipulate the data in a way that’s useful for you or your website(s).  It’s basically an RSS masher & re-hasher.  The “pipes” name comes from the Unix pipes that let you combine commands (foreign to this writer).

What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Read the full story

Nice link from Yahoo Pipes btw… what, you couldn’t figure out how to use Mod Rewrite?

The top three search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) announced last week that they’re all in support of a “sitemap” protocol/standard for websites.  This news should make most webmasters relax a little bit since they now only need to create a single sitemap file to appease all three engines, versus the complicated ways to do it before (multiple sitemap files).

The sitemap should be created as “sitemap.xml” and placed in the site’s root directory.

MorePro Marketing, Inc. can help you create a valid sitemap for your website and submit it to the various engines on your behalf.  If you’re interested in this service, please use the contact form on our website.

One of the key points made at least week’s PubCon conference in Las Vegas is that product feeds from manufacturers are considered duplicate content by most search engines.  If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense… if you have hundreds and thousands of e-commerce sites out there marketing their products with the original manufacturer’s product description and details, then you have hundreds & thousands of sites with the exact same product page (minus their own site template, etc.).

Why would the search engines want to show hundreds of pages of the exact same result?  Answer… They don’t want to.  They are going to pick one page from you or your competitor’s websites and display the results on a very limited basis; you won’t see the first 10 results in Google showing the exact same product description, etc.

I queried a snippet from a watch description of a popular online retailer in Google and got the following results:

Query: “14-karat gold case and bracelet. Cabochon crown”
Results: 87 pages with the exact phrase on them.

The solution: if you’re an online retailer serious about driving organic search traffic to your website, you better make sure that your content is unique and that you’ve “added value” to the manufacturer descriptions you’re using.  You can still use everything the manufacturer provides, but you should enrich EVERY PRODUCT with quality keyword phrases and also add your own descriptions and comments about the products.  Start with your top-selling products or your highest profit items and work your way down from there.

Ideas for adding value to your store’s content & descriptions:

• Custom write a description of each product and/or provide insight if you’re an expert.
• Provide “add your comments” or “review this product” type facilities for visitors to dynamically add the content for you (see Amazon.com product pages).

Overall, you just need to make sure you’re adding valuable, unique content to your pages in order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.  Remember, if you and all your competitors are using the exact same thing, only one of you is going to be seen!  Be sure to differentiate.

A member over on Cre8asite Forums started a topic suggesting that Link Baiting was ruining the web.

At first glance, the content seems informational, educational, or perhaps it’s just entertaining. However, that’s usually not the case: the content was only created to cause a temporary stir, a short sensation, a short-term mass of links, a short-term rise in popularity; perhaps in the hope of building a medium- or long-term reputation.

I don’t think it works that way, however. A “bubble-gum” content - nice, juicy, makes big bubbles: but stale after an hour. Boring. Lots of stale bubble-gum is just that: stale bubble gum. Lots of short term sensationalism / link-bait is the same: fresh for the moment, stale before your coffee gets cold. The only reputation that is built up is for providing stale bubble-gum. Looking at a website like that, you see a few fresh pieces, but 99% is old, out of date, out of fashion. Do you really want to be caught keeping old link-bait online?

Link baiting is one of the hottest methods for SEO companies and bloggers to increase their marketshare and their incoming link popularity.  All you need is a story or idea that people agree with and want to link to, or that they disagree with and make a big stink about it (gaining exposure for the original poster).

The comments in the forum post suggest that most link bait becomes stale pretty quickly, but I think it really depends on what the topic is and how useful the topic is to each reader.  For some folks, the information will become stale very quickly, but for others the topic could live on for several days/weeks/months or even years if it’s applicable to them or their business and it’s provides a benefit/value to them.