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 optimization 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 optimization, by reading this article you can learn from the mistakes of others. And if you’ve been doing optimization 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 optimization 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. 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 optimization. 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. 15.Don`t Make These Common optimization Mistakes! Everyone learning a new skill makes mistakes. In some fields, the necessary skills are tricky enough to keep up with that even old hands will make mistakes. directory optimization is no exception to this rule. Avoiding the most obvious mistakes can help put you ahead of the game. 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 directorys. When you get the bulk of your traffic through non-search sites, there’s less chance the bully’s tactics can hurt you.” It’s not fun when your site starts dropping in the SERPs, especially if you’ve checked everything pertaining to your site and you’re absolutely certain it isn’t your fault. I hope I’ve given you some ideas as to what you can do about it. Enormous amounts of code on the page. For some reason, even some new designs are coming to us as though they were out of 1998 as far as the page code is concerned. All skilled web designers should have a solid grasp of CSS and should be putting all the main formatting into this file(s). Way too often we're getting sites with dozens of font tags, color tags, size tags, etc. etc. etc. This just gives the directorys a lot more to dig through to find what they want – the content. I'm not even going to get into tables as that opens a whole other can of worms. If your site is table-based (your designer or optimization will be able to tell you this if you don't know) there are some basic practices to insure that the code these tables add is minimized. Unfortunately I can't get into the myriad of different situations this can entail and will have to save it for a future article (so be sure to bookmark our optimization blog to keep up-to-date on that and other developments in the industry). Fourth, you could avoid the bully. This is not the same thing as ignoring him. You simply make sure you aren’t where he is. In terms of optimization, you start targeting subjects and phrases that the black hat isn’t using. By using this approach, you can narrowly target your audience and start picking up traffic from “long tail” searches. You can also work on making your site more inviting to visitors, so when you do get that traffic they’re more likely to convert. Bad internal links. You want your internal pages to rank. Most sites will generally target the highest priority phrases on the homepage of the site but the internal pages are the ones that will rank for specific products, services and long tail phrases. To maximize the rankability of the internal pages you need them to be easily found by the spiders and you need to associate these pages with the subjects you're targeting. In short, you need to link to them with text and you need that text to include the subjects. This isn't some deep, dark mystery of optimization and has been well documented and commented on but we've seen tons of instances where internal links are image only or worse, an unspiderable script-based navigation system. Third, you could report the offender to Google. Unfortunately, like the adult aides monitoring recess in the schoolyard, Google can only act on behavior it actually sees. As Aull notes, “there’s no guarantee they’ll do anything about the miscreants quickly – or ever, for that matter.” It could also encourage a black hat optimization to start using even sneakier techniques. If your designer is using image or script-based navigation for aesthetic reasons that's fine. In fact, it'll likely leave you with a more appealing site visually however you need to make sure your key pages are linked to in the content of you homepage or from text in the footer to insure they get found and spidered quickly and easily. Second, you could take up negative optimization yourself, fighting fire with fire. That might be satisfying for a while, but your success will ring hollow after both sites are banned from the SERPs. Like a high school principal, Google isn’t going to care who started it. Over-optimized pages. I love seeing oil painting website that were developed by a web designer who “knows optimization” and has stuffed so many subjects and header tags into the pages that it reads more like an eye chart than sales copy. I can't list all the abuses that exist out there but here's a quick sample of what your page shouldn't read like (and I'll use digital cameras as the example again): Digital Cameras Digital cameras are very useful. When you need digital cameras to take digital pictures you'll want to look for our cameras first. Our digital cameras are the best digital cameras you can buy online. So when you want to buy digital cameras online be sure to visit our store and buy digital cameras online from us at the lowest prices. Defending Against Black Hat and Negative optimization Tactics - Dealing with Black Hat and Negative optimization So what do you do if a black hat optimization is directly or indirectly attacking your site’s position in the SERPs? Diane Aull came up with five possible approaches, based on how one would deal with a schoolyard bully. There is no telling which approach – if any – would be successful. Her suggestions would probably work best when dealing with someone who is not targeting your site with negative optimization, but rather engaging in black hat optimization to increase his or her own site’s ranking in the SERPs, thus driving yours down. You might want to consider combining several tactics for the best chance of ameliorating the problem. First, you can ignore what is happening, as bullied children are often told to ignore the bully. From personal experience and the anecdotes I’ve heard, that approach never works in the schoolyard. And it’s hardly the one you want to take when you see your site falling further and further behind, perhaps never to recover its position. Can you see what's wrong there? Well so can the directorys. Your pages should read like your writing for a visitor and not a directory. Yes you need to make sure your subjects get in there (which should be easy since that's what the searchers is looking for information on) but you're not looking to cram them in with a density of 30%. If you can get a density of around 3% and kept the content easily read by your human visitors then you've done well. So Rooy’s company simply saw to it that emails were sent to all the webmasters, telling them not to take the email from the scammer seriously. He observed that “a large number of links have fortunately been replaced. Despite this, it remains an annoying problem.” I mentioned that I couldn't possibly list all the horrendous issues we've encountered from designers in the past but I also promised to list some other resources you can visit for additional information. Here they are: * Great article by Sheri Thurow on the Clickz site titled, “Top Five optimization Design Mistakes * A top 10 list on the Webconfs site, “Top 10 optimization Mistakes * Another top 10 list – this time by Eric Enge on the directory Watch site titled, “The 10 Most Common optimization Mistakes If you see your web designer doing one or all of these then know in advance, you or your optimization is going to have some major hurdles to jump through. Rooy summed up the attack as finding out who is linked to a well-ranking rival site, sending them threatening email and waiting for the response. This particular scammer also sent a follow-up email if the link was not removed quickly enough. So what did Rooy do? First, he tracked down the scammer but chose not to force their host to close their account – it was located in Tajkistan, no WHOIS information was provided, and “the scammer can just as easily create another address and continue his painting, against whichever art paintings site he chooses.” Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk directory Positioning. Beanstalk offers optimization, consulting, training, copywriting and link building services to clients from around the world. We would like to thank Moonrise design, a San Francisco web design company, for allowing us to use our experiences with them as an example. Be sure to visit our optimization articles archives for more information on optimization and web design best practices.
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