It is this experience and reflecting back on other web designers we've worked smoothly with in the past that inspired me to write this article. The article is more for potential clients of designers than for the designers themselves. So for those looking for a designer – if you want your site to rank highly and/or you'll be hiring an SEO – here's what to look for. Don't overdo your keywords and don't duplicate it on the pages of the website. Content should be fresh and unique. Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - Domain Disasters What could be more basic than your domain name? Perhaps that’s the reason that so many SEO errors revolve around this basic necessity. Maybe it’s because I’m an editor as well as a writer, but to me, one of the more painful mistakes has to be misspelling your domain name. If you’re buying your own domain name, and you know how to spell well, that might not be as big an issue. But if you don’t, or you’re simply telling a web site designer to buy it for you, you can run into some problems. Picking A Web Designer There are two main considerations that you'll need to make when you're picking your web designer. The first is, can they build an attractive site and the second is can they build a directory friendly site? Before I go into detail about the specific things you need to avoid, I’m going to tell you what I think is the biggest SEO mistake anyone can make if they’re serious about making money from their web site. That mistake is neglecting to stay on top of the trends and information pertaining to the field. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other directories and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising. Building an attractive site: I am probably the last person to ask about what's attractive and what's not. When the Beanstalk site was up for a redesign a couple years ago I hired a professional web design company to build it. I can't create pretty things but I know how to test and I know how to monitor statistics to see if the traffic is behaving as I would hope. Making mistakes in the way you optimize your web site can cost you, both tangibly and intangibly. The tangible cost, of course, comes in money, whether your site is directly engaged in e-commerce or makes its money from advertising. The intangible cost comes in lost traffic and wasted effort. Even when the rest of your site’s SEO is impeccable, certain mistakes can wipe out all the benefits you’d otherwise gain. Here's what to look at: When you're choosing a designer take a look at their portfolio – put some of their designs past people in your target demographic and see what they think. It's also wise to view the sites of the leaders in your industry to see what they're doing (and maybe even who designed their sites). Just because you like something doesn't mean it's effective to your target market. If you really are just starting to do SEO, by reading this article you can learn from the mistakes of others. And if you’ve been doing SEO for a while but never made these mistakes, don’t feel excluded; there’s no way I could cover every possible mistake in a single article. Indeed, judging from the links I turned up, I could fill a whole book with SEO mistakes to avoid. At least a couple of chapters could be devoted to blogging mistakes, which I don’t plan to cover in any great detail here.One contributor to the SEO Chat forum suggests spending a lot of time in SEO forums, asking a lot of questions, then coming back several times a day and doing it all over again. He suggests this as a daily ritual. You also need to know if your designer is skilled at conversion optimization. Have they read such works as Enquiro's eye tracking studies. Have they done their research (or have you) regarding which colors make people act in which ways? These are extremely important issues to be aware of. If you look at the eye tracking studies - the Beanstalk site places our logo, the Hacker Safe logo and main title in the key zones. We also went with green giving a natural (easy on the eyes) feel that implies wealth and is strongly associated with money. When we changed to our current design the effects were immediately detectable in how our visitors behaved visiting more pages for longer periods of time and, most importantly, increasing our communication with us significantly. You probably know that Google turns up more than 23 million hits if you search for SEO. It also turns up 174,000 for the phrase “SEO mistakes” (without quotation marks). So if, while you’re reading my article, you discover that you’re doing something you shouldn’t be, take heart – you’re in good company. And it isn’t too late to make amends. If your designer is not aware of these things do not despair, they may be a fine designer indeed and may have this understanding intuitively (though a little research to back up any intuition is always a sound policy). That said, be aware of the information that is out there and ask questions when you're asked to approve designs. Building a directory friendly site: This is crucially important but probably one of the areas we have to address most frequently. I can't possibly get into all the various areas of directory friendly design so I'll simply list off a couple of the most common issue we encounter and then provide references to other reading. Fifth, you could work at becoming popular, and having enough people around you all the time that it scares off the bully. Aull’s explanation of this approach is worth quoting at length; she advocates becoming “a valued member of the web ‘community’ by linking generously, taking advantage of social networking, and developing useful content, resources and tools that others will naturally want to link to. The more ‘web friends’ you have linking to your pages, the stronger your pages will be, and the more sources of traffic you’ll have that don’t depend on the search engines.
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