SEO Mistakes & Good SEO Ideas

Mistake number one is working on SEO before your site has a value proposition. Ask yourself: Why would a user choose my site in search results? Let’s say you have a site that promotes your offline business, like a local bike repair shop. What differentiates your business from your competitors? Are you a non-profit organization, or perhaps you offer free estimates, a free demo, or you’re the oldest independent dealer in the city. Or, if you’re an ecommerce site – what separates your site from the others? Do you have lower prices, free shipping, great customer service, or better product descriptions? Starting with the value proposition simplifies SEO. No matter where your site ranks in search results, if you want to stay on top, searchers need a value prop to click on your site, to come back and revisit your site, and to recommend your site to their friends. Start with a value prop, and then focus on a quality user experience.

Let’s move to mistake number two: a segmented approach to SEO. I call this the bento box approach because I’m Japanese and it’s like your dinner plate with every item segmented and none of it working together. It’s great for your sushi and your salad, it’s not as great when there is no communication between your marketing, biz dev, and SEO teams. So, mistake number two is about working on SEO in a silo. A better, more holistic approach to SEO is to consider the entire user experience, from marketing campaign all the way to the actual conversion and potentially repeat business. Vanessa Fox, a consultant and author on search-engine strategy, wrote about this type of bento box approach with respect to the Superbowl. When it’s difficult for companies to completely integrate their offline television ads with their online SEO efforts, she noted that a car company spent millions on TV ads to lead users to a website: edityourown.com where they could then edit their own car video. On Superbowl Sunday, this commercial probably not only brought users to the website, but actually helped the query “edit your own” to rank number 36 on Google hot trends. Now, imagine if this were your company: as the SEO, you can’t just focus on the regular keywords that you do everyday, but you also need to integrate marketing campaigns and optimize for the words “edit your own”.

Mistake number three is putting effort into time-consuming workarounds, rather than researching new features or best practices that can simplify your tasks. For example, for sites with paginated content, in the past some webmasters tried the workaround of using rel canonical [verbatim 3:25] on subsequent pages to their page one. This unfortunately can cause a loss of content in Google’s index, the good news is that there are new best practices. We now support rel next and rel prev markup, so your paginated article or product category is treated as a single series rather than having pagerank diluted into the various components. Also in the past, to have several new or updated pages crawled as quickly as possible, webmasters might have performed the lengthy tax of updating their site map with the new URLs then uploading the new sitemap to the file, then submitting it to Google. In 2011, we expanded webmaster tools such as Google Bot so that, per week, you can submit up to 500 new or updated URLs that you would like to be crawled, or up to 10 URLs that you’d like crawled along with their linked pages. When submitting through Fetch’s [verbatim 4:30], most URLs are crawled within 24 hours. An easy way to stay in touch with new features and best practices is to submit to the Webmaster Central block.

Now, while mistake number three is about time consuming workarounds often because an SEO isn’t as up to date, mistake number four is along a similar spectrum but now it’s getting caught in SEO trends. In the early days of search engines, both webmasters and search engines chased the user, who are running the same race: get more users to visit and convert. Then, as the market matured, things went a little crazy. It was as if this race split into two simultaneous races, and rather than chasing users, some websites started chasing search engine algorithms. In over six years at Google, I’ve seen SEO trends take many forms. Around 2005, SEOs lost focus and spent countless hours editing their content for the optimal keyword density, meaning keywords per page. Not a great use of their time. Instead, they could have better spent their time making their content readable, compelling, and informative. I’m sure you have a long list of tasks for your site, try to avoid the SEO trends and instead prioritize the task that will bring lasting value.

Finally, this brings us to mistake number five: slow iteration. At Google, we’ve been known to say that the main constant in SEO is that it’s constantly evolving. The faster your team is able to iterate, the better. A good recipe is to one: define metrics to success, then two: implement improvements, next: measure the impact and then create new improvements, and then last: prioritize those improvements based on the market and your teams personnel. Then, of course, repeat! The advantage to having an agile SEO cycle is quite clear. In 2009, we launched rich snippets, recipe or event sites that could iterate quickly and implement the proper markup could now show much more appealing search results. The same was true of video sites that were able to quickly create and submit video site maps. Again, those who were agile could get the benefits.

Those are the five most common SEO mistakes that I find. But now, let’s cover good practices in SEO. First, do something cool! Have a value proposition that separates you from your competitors. Second, include relevant keywords in your copy. There’s no need to think about keyword density, but make sure your content includes the keywords people actually search for. Three, be smart about your tags, title tags, and meta description tags and your site architecture. Four, sign up for email forwarding and webmaster tools. This allows important messages from Google, such as notifications for crawl issues, to be forwarded directly to the inbox you check regularly, whether that’s your work account inbox, Yahoo, or Gmail. Five, attract buzz! This helps bring natural links, great reviews, votes, +1’s, and follows. Last, stay fresh and relevant. Perhaps expand your reach to social media sites if that’s a great place to reach your audience, or make sure your site is accessible on smartphones if your product is great on-the-go.

I hope this video helps you avoid the common SEO mistakes and instead focus on the good practices that can bring lasting, positive benefits. Thanks for watching.