I was excited this morning to see a post on the Top 10 SEO Mistakes from Search Engine Watch. I am going to post the Top 10 here as well as provide some insight on how these are especially important in the Industrial Market as well. Thank You Search Engine Watch for providing valuable search engine optimization information, trends and common mistakes.

The Top 10 SEO Mistakes:

1. Broken information architecture
2. Poor site usability
3. Mismanaged internal link juice
4. Content getting buried over time
5. Bad redirects
6. Poor titles and headers
7. Insufficient content
8. Duplicate content
9. All flash site
10. Same meta description (and keywords) on every page.

Broken information architecture. This mistake is referring to the layout of information on the website. The site structure should make sense to the end user. What are your customers looking for and can they easily find the information they want? The naming of pages, as well as, the naming of the navigation is important. If your navigation and information is clearly laid out your bounce rate for your website will most likely be lower.

Usability is a huge part of Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. It is great if you can get all of this traffic to your website and high visibility with your keywords or phrases, but what is the purpose of your website? You want to have conversions. If your website doesn’t have great usability - then the efforts your put forward with SEO will in a sense “be nothing.” The industrial market is slowly coming around to understanding the importance of a well laid out website that has call to actions and different ways to convert a customer. One thing the Industrial Market can keep in mind is that the website is a supplement to all other traditional marketing you do as well. If you are getting an inquiry over the phone, ask the customer where they learned about you - your online visitors may be converting over the phone as well!

Mismanaged Internal Link Juice. This is referring to the different pages that link to other pages within your website. An organized linking structure is key. A way to improve your linking strategy is to have themed pages within your website. Everything that is related to Search Engine Marketing for example within the Ecreativeworks website should be linked to the SEO page or vice versa.

Burying your content. Don’t flood your pages with content that isn’t organized neatly. It is great to have updated information, but remember that most people will not “scroll.” The content should easily call out to your customers and be easy to find.

Redirects. We talked about 301 Redirects before. Make sure you implement these when updating your website. You worked hard to get visibility for a term, do lose it when you are updating your website and possibly renaming pages.

The content you provide your clients is important. In the industrial market most of the content is educational or informational about a product or service. Use your title tags and headers to emphasis the topic of a page.

Content, Content, Content. Content drives search results. Make the time to implement it on your website. It is worth the effort.

Duplicate Content. Stay away from using the same content for every page or even portions of pages. Your website will be penalized.

Flash sites. This isn’t that apparent in the Industrial Market, but try not to be tempted by the idea when considering a redesign. The search engines and end users are looking for content, not a site to entertain them or increase their frustrations because they don’t know what to do or where to go.

Meta Descriptions and Keywords. This is an important part of any SEO campaign. Take the time to customize your source code and keep the search engines interested.

The Industrial Marketplace can learn from the mistakes that other websites are making. If we are applying the same concepts and enhancing the websites we are working on then the Internet can be a large part of the Marketing campaign for a client.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 2:13 pm and is filed under General, Industrial SEO, Advanced SEO Concepts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.