50 Reasons Why Your SEO Isn't Getting You Results.
Written by: Nick LeRoy
You see it all the time in the "SEO World." People complain about why the SEO gods aren't blessing them with top search engine rankings. Normally these people claim there is a reason why Google "hates" them and it's absolutely under no circumstances their fault for poor rankings. Unfortunately these are the people who don't try hard enough, are lazy, or simply underestimate what it takes to succeed in SEO. Mentioned blwo are FIFTY reasons why your SEO campaign could be failing.
Mistakes Made Before You Even Start SEO
1. You decided that keyword research was a waste of time.
2. picking your keywords blindly or use industry jargon (terms your customer don't use).
3. Not spending the time to accurately analyze the competition for keywords.
4. Only focusing on the "money" keywords and completely ignoring long tail keywords.
5. You decide it's a waste of time to analyze your competion.
Mistakes Made Before On Page SEO Begins
6. Verifying if the existing website is search engine friendly.
7. NOT analyzing robots.txt to make sure nothing important is being blocked from the search engines.
8. Noting whether the website is on your own domain instead of a free hosting service. (such as blogger or the old Yahoo Geocities)
9. Not taking the time to identify any existing search engine penalties.
10. Not identifying any "black hat" SEO techniques already implemented on the website.
Mistakes Made While Completing On Page SEO
11. Choosing to not give every page within the site a unique title tag that incorporates keywords that match that pages content.
12. Not placing your keyword in the front of the title tag.
13. Your title tags are longer than 70 charachters long.
14. You don't write custom meta descriptions that are unique to every page.
15. You spend too much time (or any time) focusing on the meta keywords tag. These tags no longer offer ranking value.
16. Placing very little or no text within the web page.
17. Creating your pages content within an image.
18. The entire page is utilizing flash and or JavaScript
19. Placing links (without "no follow") that are obviously purchased within a "sponsored", "Supporters", or at the footer of your site.
20. Creating a links page that you intent to use for trading hundreds of links.
21. Building navigation that takes more than three clicks to reach all internal pages.
22. Not utilizing bread crumb navigation for large e-commerce websites.
23. Linking products pages by the image (without alt text) instead of a text link.
24. Not optimizing all pages within the website missing out on long tail traffic and internal linking opportunities.
25. Incorrectly setting up a robots.txt file that stops the search engines from indexing your website.
Mistakes Being Made While Link Building
26. Forum signature links amke up the majority of your link profile.
27. You write content to publish on your site then you outsource it to a site that has higher domain authority, essentially outranking your own site with your own content.
28. Focusing all your efforts on spam blog commenting.
29. Outsourcing your link building efforts to someone who offers 100 links for $10.00
30. Creating a links page and trading hundreds of reciprical links with other sites.
31. Purchasing links from link buying brokers.
32. Creating too many links from one source. (Not creating a diverse link profile)
33. Opting to register your site for every free web directory created.
35. All of your links only point to your homepage.
36. Obtaining every single link using the same anchor text.
37. You use link building "software" to obtain links.
38. Writing SEO professionals or tech savvy webmasters for links without offering anything of value to them.
39. Wasting your time by re-submitting to DMOZ directory every single day.
40. Sending out spammy link request e-mails that doesn't include any linkable content.
Mistakes Made With Social Media & Review Sites
41. You create a social media account assuming the links are "do-follow".
42. Every one of you "tweets" is promotional.
43. Any fans you receive on Facebook get an immediate spam message sent to them upon become a "fan".
44. Actively choosing to not interact with anyone on your social media accounts.
45. Using a robot or program to automate everything social media related.
46. Never re-tweeting or sharing other people's news/information.
47. Writing your own company reviews... please, just don't do it. You will get caught!
48. Paying people to write positive reviews for your company.
49. Offering advice that is not try or questionable on social media while claiming to be an expert.
50. Not being real or refusing to have a personality.
SEO can be trick and successful techniques change often. I would argue that to be successful in your SEO campaign you have to know what you can't do as much as what you should do. It doesn't matter how much your doing right if something as simple as your site not being indexed occurs. Make sure you avoid these fifty tactics mentioned above. If you don't, your SEO won't amount to anything.