Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

We have all been a newbie SEO at one time or another. But if you are new to the industry… or just need a refresher that you aren’t making a cardinal newbie error when it comes to your site’s optimization, here are some of the top and most frequent mistakes and how to fix them. And yes, I did one of these back in 1999… although fortunately it wasn’t one of the ones that would get me banned, either back then or now!

My site ranks for “some really obscure multi-keyword phrase”.

Wow, you rank number one for “search engine optimization in Smalltown USA”. But who actually searches for that? You can be number one for tens of thousands of obscure keyword combinations, but if no one is actually searching for any of them, you have just wasted your time and effort optimizing for them (but hopefully it was sheer coincidence that you rank for them, and not actual effort on your part!)

Instead, use one of the many tools on the market that can give you some idea of how many people are searching for various keyword combinations related to your industry and focus on the ones that can actually bring you traffic rather than the unusual or obscure ones that no one ever searches for except you when you check your rankings.

Only focusing on the homepage

In the short tail world, one would only need to focus on the homepage. But in the world where long tail is not only king but queen too, you cannot afford to let your internal pages go neglected while your homepage gets the royal treatment.

Consider your internal pages just as important as your homepage, and don’t forget that a large percentage of your visitors will actually enter your site through an internal page, and not the homepage, so ensure that you have suitable navigation in place so that the visitor won’t get lost if they didn’t happen to get to your site via your homepage.

Too much time and effort on the meta tags

Yes, once upon a time meta tags were a very important part of any search engine optimization campaign. But the fairy tale is over and while you definitely shouldn’t ignore the value of meta tags, they aren’t so much relevant nowadays for rankings as they are for displaying what shows in the search engine results page.

The robots.txt oops

I am still a person that triple checks any robots.txt file I do. And while I fortunately (knock on wood) have never had any problems by accidentally disallowing all bots from visiting any of my sites via a robots.txt-gone-bad, I have seen the results of newbie webmasters who think they are telling Googlebot and Slurp to visit their site, when they are actually disallowing them from visiting and indexing the entire site. Ooops.

If you too live in fear, run any robots.txt file through a validator the moment it goes up (to reduce the window of opportunity of a bot happening to visit when you have a messed up robots.txt file live on the site). And it is worth double checking Google Webmaster Central to make sure Googlebot doesn’t have any indexing problems stemming from robots.txt, or any other reason.

Focusing on the traffic numbers without checking the follow through

Wow, so you had ten thousand visitors today. That traffic is pretty decent, depending on your goals, but the most important figure is page views… and the bounce rate. If those ten thousand visitors have a bounce rate of 98% (meaning only 2% of those ten thousand actually stuck around to click a second page) you need to figure out why so many leave after their first page view. Reduce your bounce rate and your page views will go up, and you can turn the slightly over 10,000 page views into 20,000 or 30,000, simply by figuring out why 98% of your traffic leaves immediately and what you can do to ensure they stick around for at least another page or two.

Don’t forget it is much easier to make some changes to a page or website to keep a visitor on your site for a few additional page views than it is to optimize to get entirely new visitors.

It’s only about the links

There is no doubt that inbound links are very important to any website. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it is the only important thing about your site. Sure, throw enough links at even the crappiest site and it will probably rank… however it will also probably tank in the serps shortly after. For your site to live a happy and healthy existence in the search engine results, you need to include links in your SEO strategy, but we aware that it is only one piece of the entire SEO pie.

While there are also many other newbie SEO mistakes (hidden text, keyword stuffing and spammy linking strategies, just to name a few) these are some of the common ones that I am sure some of you can admit you just might have done in the past before you knew better!

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It would be pretty nice if we could just select our top chosen keyword phrase as our anchor text and then use it for all incoming links we gather for our website. Unfortunately, it isn’t year 2000, and this technique just doesn’t hold the weight it once did, not to mention the fact that you very likely have more than one keyword phrase you want to rank well for.

So this brings us to the question of not only how to choose anchor text for brand new incoming links, but to also use anchor text in a way to make your backlinks look as natural as possible (even if they aren’t!) to the Google (and other search engine) powers-that-be. Here are some tips when it comes to selecting that crucial anchor text as well as things to consider once you start gathering (or buying) backlinks.

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We have all had friends who ask us for help getting into the world of online marketing and search engine optimization, wanting us to teach them everything we know so they can make just as much money as us while working in their pajamas from home all day… but without really wanting to put in the effort to do it. Not to mention the fact that you often feel you “have” to help them out if they ask because of that guilty complex you have of always being there for your friends. Now combine that with the fact you can almost guarantee that certain friends who ask you this will never actually be serious enough about it to make it work after you do help them out. So you don’t necessarily want to invest a huge amount of time or effort into it in case he decides he hates it!

Lucky for you, there are some ways you can be that good friend and give them the tools and help they need to get started with as little pain and suffering (yours!) involved. Here are some tips on what you can do to be helpful and supportive… yet not do everything for him, which unfortunately, as experience has proven, some of your so-called friends will want you to do!

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It is still amazing to me the number of people who care most about what their AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing CTR is on their ads, while seemingly ignoring what is arguably the far more important - not to mention valuable - pay per click metric. Yes, CTR is valuable to know, but in reality, a higher CTR doesn’t necessarily equate to higher profits or sales.

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Seasonal content is one area that too few websites take advantage of. This is for a few reasons, but primarily because when a website writer comes up with an idea for a great holiday-related article, it tends to be only a few weeks or days before the holiday and there just isn’t enough time for that article to get traction in the search engines before the season is over.

If you are one of those people who comes up with brilliant article ideas a few days before the actual holiday, you can start preparing to earn money off that content next holiday season. Because let’s face it, the majority of us won’t remember that great article idea next year, nor will be remember we were going to write it at all until it is too late to get it ranking or even written before the holiday has passed yet again.

The other reason is that webmasters tend to dismiss seasonal content because it is only searched for over such a short period of time each year, then lies dormant, without earning any revenue, for the other eleven months of the year. And the thinking is that it is better to have content that is searched for throughout the entire year, not just the 2-4 weeks that seasonal content tends to be searched for.

However, many webmasters find that seasonal content can drive a huge number of sales or clicks, even though that seasonal content tends to only be heavily used for a short period of time each year. There are sites that can make the majority of its yearly income simply through well ranked seasonal content driving visitors to the site in droves over the period of a few weeks. So there is the potentiall that you could more than double your income simply by adding some seasonal content.

So here is a plan of action you can use in order to timeline yourself better. Once you do this, you can easily add the new content to your site in the best way to get the related holiday traffic next time around before it comes upon you again and you realize that you missed the boat again.

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Are you feeling a little overzealous about your use of keywords? If you have the nagging worry that you just might have used your chosen keywords a few too many times on your webpage, chances are good that your probably you did.

But how too many is really too many when it comes to search engine optimization? Well, you’d probably be surprised. There are plenty of “thou shall nots” that webmasters seem to break constantly, simply because they don’t realize that keyword spamming is an actual penalty that will cause their site to get booted right out of the Google index. Here are some of the things you can check and do to ensure your on-page keywords don’t trip the spam filter and are working most effectively for your site’s optimization.

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You know the tools, the ones that the uninformed… or barely informed… take as gospel when it comes to search engine optimization. These tools in the hands of your client… or worse, a really bad SEO who is trying to steal a client… can be a deadly thing. And worse, because they used to be useful once upon a time, most of these tools are the ones that people have heard of.

Is your client measuring your success on how much the site’s Alexa ranking goes up or down? Or using an automated rank checker program, ala Web Position Gold, to check the Google positioning for his top fifty chosen keywords every hour on the hour? Here are the tools and programs that can be oh-so-dangerous in the hands of the SEO uneducated.

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When you create the content on your landing page, it is important to consider not only the elements that go into your landing page design, but also consider the things that should be avoided. Yet time after time I come across landing pages – some which advertisers are paying premium prices per click to send traffic to – that seem to break many of the landing page rules and very likely result in a high loss of potential conversions.

So what are the things that should and shouldn’t be included on a landing page? Here are some tips on creating and maintaining a high converting landing page for both organic and paid search results. And as an added bonus, some of these also help with your AdWords quality score if you are having issues with it.

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You know those little favicons, where people try and make something resembling their logo appear in a teeny, tiny 16×16 pixel image. They show up in the navigation bar of many browsers and also appear in browser bookmarks or favorites (hence the name favicons which was shortened from favorites icon). But while they definitely have the coolness factor, especially if you manage to capture your site’s look successfully in the favicon, does your site really need to incorporate one? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

A few years ago, favicons were only seen on a handful of sites, either super geeky ones or big brand ones. But since then, favicons have been becoming more mainstream and much more common to see. So while they have been gaining popularity, some savvy marketers are using them for branding as well as to encourage repeat visitors. But how, you might ask?

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