If you missed the first part of this post be sure to Read Part 1 which covers 1-5.

6.  LEAD CAPTURE – DOESN’T EXIST, LACKS APPEAL, OR ASKS TOO MUCH

Think like a searcher.  When you are browsing the net and come across an interesting offer, how much are you willing to do to get it.  Personally if the form asks for my address, they don’t get my info at all.

  It’s just too much work, plus I fear they are going to spam my email to death.  They’re is usually no need to collect addresses from your market unless you plan on showing up for dinner one night.  Email and name most often are all you need satisfy future marketing efforts.  Read more about lead capture here

7.  LURED BY FLASH – YOUR SITE LOOKS COOL BUT WHO IS GOING TO FIND YOU?

The only language guaranteed to be search engine friendly is HTML /CSS.  Flash programming which typically is what moving objects are written in, is virtually invisible to search engines and will render your efforts to earn a top spot in search results, futile.  If you must have moving graphics, keep them in the header of your site, sparing the other areas especially the navigation.  Search engines crawl your site much like humans, but if they cant read your navigation – guess what? They can’t get to other areas of your site.  You’ve basically blocked access for them and success for you.

8.   FAILURE TO THINK LIKE A USER IN BUILDING/DEVELOPING NAVIGATIONAL ASPECTS OF WEBSITE.

These types of things are always better left to professionals.  Sure you may think your site is easy to navigate because you know it well. Have a couple people who don’t know it well take it for a test drive.  Things you think are obvious are not for fresh visitors, seeing your site for the first time.

You’ll be amazed by the feedback.  Make sure this person is also not familiar with your business model.

It’s just like writing.  We may proofread our own work thousands of times and are absolutely 100% certain there are no errors.  Then we give it to someone else who sends it back to us showing several errors.  I don’t know about you, but I am certain they added those errors to sabotage me, because those were not there before. Truth is, they were there, we just didn’t notice them because of our familiarity with what we wanted or meant to say, each time rehearsing it with the correct usage of words. This is an almost identical scenario.  Think simple, and dumb it waaaaay down.

9.  UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE INTERNET

I will guarantee you that success will not find you on the internet.  Despite many misconceptions that the internet is magic, it is in contrast, very deliberate.  It provides access to a virtual roadway and that is it. We are responsible for navigating our destiny and thus our success.  Doing nothing will continue to push your site and presence farther down until it’s “virtually” invisible. Without hard work and dedication on an ongoing basis,  success will run away from you along with your market and search engines.

10.  SKIPPING OVER  SEO OR USING A DIY METHOD TO SAVE MONEY.

I have referred to SEO on many occassions as “the core of all marketing strategies” Similar to the foundation of a house, if your SEO is weak, the rest of your marketing strategies will suffer.

1. DOMAIN NAME SELECTION – (LACKS KEYWORD)

Exact match keyword domains are worth their weight in gold.  It’s the sure thing to acquiring a top spot.  The second best is getting one that has the keyword somewhere in it.  I don’t recommend buying a domain name that doesn’t have your keyword in it.  You will be making things a lot harder on your self.  Many people think they have to buy the domain name of their company?  Why, so people who have never heard of your company can find you? That was a joke.  Unless your company name is Coca Cola or unless your company name already contains your keyword sure buy the domain but also buy a keyword domain related to your business.  This will be the domain your site is hosted upon and you will direct the other domain that is your company name to the keyword domain.  So when all your fans and customers type your business name into the browser “yourcompanyname.com” they will be taken to your site at  “yourkeyworddomain.com”  So those who aren’t familiar with your site/business  ie, YOUR MARKET, can find you easier when they search using keywords related to your industry.

2. SITE IS NOT BLOCKED DURING THE DEVELOPMENT STAGE

I learned this the hard way.  When you are in the developmental stages of your website design it is very important to block all search engine access to it using either a robots.txt file or if using wordpress you can do it from the backend under “privacy.” Failure to do so could negatively affect your performance  long term in the SERPS.  It will make an already difficult project even harder.

3. TARGETING GENERAL  KEYWORDS WITH  MASS SEARCH VOLUME

This is fairly self explanatory and very popular mistake.  Here is an example.  Someone searching for “shoes” probably doesn’t know what they want, or have any intentions of buying, they are “browsers” also known as “tire kickers”, “time wasters” or in this landscape “bandwidth wasters” Sure you may drive more traffic to your site targeting general keywords, but it’s useless traffic and will probably cost you more in the long run, since their presence on your site is not completely cost free.  These tend to be the ones that like to call and ask you thousands of silly questions.  They start eating into your soft costs after a while, and your nerves.  Someone searching for “high heels” is a much more targeted market and maybe still a bit on the general side.  You get the idea.

4. POORLY WRITTEN OR NON EXISTANT META TAGS

I cannot stress enough how important Meta tags are for many different reasons. How they are written can also heavily influence your ranking.  Don’t attempt to do these yourself, and don’t look to the internet for information on how to write them.  It’s an unsolved mystery as to why there is so much inaccurate info on Metas or why no one has stepped up and announced the correct way except for me and maybe one or two others.  Understanding the dual purpose of Meta tags ie what they are used for, will help you to better understand how to write them.

5. FAIL TO DO COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

Chances are your competitors know something you don’t if they have been online for more than a season.  Use that to your advantage.  Mostly, just learn how to do it better.

Yep I know, there is supposed to be 10 critical mistakes….and there is! Stay tuned for Part 2.  Want a reminder sent when the next post is published?  Subscribe to my feed.

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It happens on a regular basis.  A client comes to me with his finished site, proud of its spectacular look with moving graphics and fancy navigation that spins around when you hover over it with your mouse.  After he proudly proclaims of his readiness to do internet marketing, I watch the deflation occur as I tell him his site will need to be entirely rebuilt if being found on the internet is important to him.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to include a marketing professional in your web design project. Moving graphics require coding that is not read by search engines.  Too much of it surrounding your HTML (the content that is understood by search engines) is likely to be missed or skipped over.  As a rule of thumb, keeping all moving graphics or text within the header of your site is the best policy for providing a “content rich” website that will have a much better chance at being found or ranking in the SERP’s 

This is just one of the very important reasons you should include a web marketing professional in your web design project, however there are thousands of others.  Often people lump web designers in with internet marketers and vice versa.  What is important to remember is that although their services may overlap in relation to that website, their purpose is very different.  A web designer is interested in two things 1. The way the site looks, and the client satisfaction in how it looks.  Internet Marketing professionals care much less about how a site looks and more about its functionality for users and marketability to search engines.   Asking or expecting your web designer to make your site “SEO Friendly” is like asking an electrician to build a house. 

The biggest downside of excluding a marketing professional in the web design process is that trying to make changes after the fact is sometimes more difficult even impossible without a complete redesign.  Internet marketing has a huge focus on code/content that is the framework of your website.  Just like a house,  if you take the frame away the entire house comes crashing down.

 SEO starts from the very beginning of a website’s conception.  Although SEO can later be implemented, at times it can be difficult, requiring so much reconstruction one would virtually need to rebuild an entire new website to make it SEO friendly.  With that in mind, having an SEO specialist working with the programmer and web designer to make sure all of the necessary SEO components are built into the design and the text is optimal.  Although due to cost this approach isn’t always possible, it ensures an SEO driven site with the necessary SEO components built in.

The general design of the site can be a critical feature on the readability of your site by the major search engines. Though sites programmed with flash animation tend to be eye catching they originally were unable to be indexed by Google.  So they were eye catching if you could actually find them.  A recent article put out by Google states of an improvement in their search engines ability to read flash animation but not something I would even risk if your goal is to be found in the search results.  Despite the good idea to leave flash animation out of the body of the site having your header with such programming adds a similar appeal yet remains SEO friendly. This is just one of the many things to keep in mind while building an optimized site.

Another factor of SEO that can be incorporated into web design is the ALT image Tag feature.  Here the web designer would enter a keyword within the programming of each graphic that appears on the page.  This lends additional opportunity for keyword instances that attract search engines for user search.  Because this is not easily done by an SEO Consultant after the site has been completed and most often requires the assistance of a web designer it helps to instill these features during the initial construction.

Keyworded urls are also an important feature for SEO.  Sometimes this offers an excellent opportunity to drop keywords/phrases in for added optimization assuming your domain name has the keyword in it and if it doesn’t this feature is especially important.  Let’s look at an example of a keyworded URL and how we can maximize keyword usage.  Remember any link that has our keyword in it is worth twice its weight a keyword.  So let’s say the keyword is “Button Jewelry”  the domain name is www.uniquebuttonjewelry.com/  and one of the pages on her site found by clicking on the navigation button that says “browse our shop” has a url that looks like this www.uniquebuttonjewelry.com/buybuttonjewelry.html   The keyword “button jewelry” has now appeared twice within the url  and although by itself may not lend much weight in terms of optimization, when used in conjunction with the many other urls for your website this can have a strong affect on a sites performance in the search results. 

While there are many more SEO tactics that one can incorporate into the initial design of their website these are some of the basics and ones that will lend assistance with a site’s performance in the search results.  Remember to talk with your web designer about building these features and more into your website.  This could save you a lot of work later.  http://www.contentwriterseo.com