Top 10 Webmaster SEO Mistakes And How to Avoid Them - Part 2 of 2

If you haven't done so, start with Top 10 Webmaster SEO Mistakes Part 1 before continuing on.

Mistake #6 - Expecting a Miracle

The Mistake: Online businesses are booming and the potential is unlimited as more and more users jump onto the information super highway every day. In an attempt to cash in and make some very easy money, you hastily create a couple websites with little content and not much substance. You put your feet up and sit back and wait for the cash to start flowing in as people flock to your sites!

The Reality: If only it were that easy... we would all be millionaires! I’m sure most people have heard the movie quote “if you build it, they will come”. Well, that most certainly does NOT apply to online websites. The simple reality is that people are not going to just stumble upon your website. Even if you've done a lot of keyword analysis and applied proper SEO to your web pages, chances are you are not going to get any substantial traffic. You need to be one part webmaster, one part salesman, and one part marketing expert to succeed in an online business. Think of it like this. If you’ve lost a recent job and sit in your house and never submit your resume, never conduct interviews, and never market yourself… do you really think your phone will ring with a job offer? You need to hit the market, promote yourself as the best in your field, and peruse every possible opportunity that is presented to you. It’s the same way with online businesses.

Mistake #7 - Ignoring The Importance of Links

The Mistake: You've set-up your website and have been getting some decent traffic thanks to your paid marketing campaigns ( ) and off-line marketing. Several webmasters with competing sites email you and ask for link exchanges or offer you a one-way link (perhaps in exchange for writing an article for their site). Sitting up on your high-horse you turn them down. After all, why would you want to help a competitor?

The Reality: This is a huge mistake. By not participating in link exchanges (or more importantly, securing one-way links) it's not your competitor who will be hurt, it's yourself! A very heavy component in search engine algorithms in determining the search engine rankings is the number of links a website has pointing to it. Think of each link as a vote of support. As your website gains more votes, its level of popularity is considered to be higher by the search engines. Of course, not every link exchange or one-way link can be a good one. You need to make sure to pick your link partners based on relevance to your own website category. For example, if your website is dedicated to the PC game World of Warcraft, you wouldn’t want to link to a website that sells woman's shoes. On the other hand, if a webmaster approaches you for a link exchange to his website that provides hints and tips to PC games then that would be a very relevant link. One-way links are perhaps the most difficult to get as very few webmasters are willing to provide an outgoing link without getting something in return, especially websites that have a high PageRank. To gain one-way links you have several options. The first is to pay for them. When paying for a one-way link it's suggested you go after only those with high PageRank (PR) as they will be weighted heavier than those with low PR. The second option is to sign-up for one-way links directory services such as Free Links Direct. Services such as these provide free one-way links month over month provided that you link out to several sites from your homepage. Two other strong options are to write articles and press releases and then submit them to article and press release directories.

Mistake #8 - Not Filling Pages With Enough Relevant Content

The Mistake: Writing content can be very time consuming and a real chore when you're already balancing your full-time job and family on top of your website(s). Since the number of pages on a site has a direct correlation to the weighting you gain in SERPs, you add several dozen pages with only a few sentences that are keyword rich for each page and then throw in an image or two to fill the white space.

The Reality: Well, the good thing is you've created several keyword targeted pages in your site rather than stuffing all of it into one page. That's the good news. Now the bad news. By only adding a few sentences to each page you are killing your chance of being picked up in search engines and providing very little value to your users at the same time. It's better to have a few pages with high quality content than a lot of pages with little to no content. It really is a quality vs. quantity thing. The best suggestion is to ensure each page contains at least 250 words at a minimum. By adding more words you can increase your keyword density and also provide users with something valuable to read.

Mistake #9 - Not Creating or Updating Sitemaps

The Mistake: Sitemaps are a pain. Not only do they require constant updates every time a new page is updated, but they just look plain ugly and don't offer much value to your users! Sitemaps are a waste of time.

The Reality: Sitemaps are the blueprint to your website. Without these blueprints, search engine spiders are going to have a difficult time crawling your site. Your goal is to get every single page you've created indexed by all search engine crawlers. Providing a sitemap to the crawlers is an easy way to ensure they will crawl each page in your website (that's included in the sitemap). Sitemaps also serve a practical use to your users by presenting an overview of your site navigation tree. Some users prefer jumping to a sitemap page for quick navigation as the various pages are not obscured behind collapsible menus. With a little work, you can present your sitemap in a manner that is both pleasing to your users and easy to crawl for the search engines.

Mistake #10 - Changing Filenames or Removing Pages of an Established Website

The Mistake: Your site has been going strong for a couple years. Traffic is outstanding and you're finally ranking in the top 10 in the major search engines. Only problem is your site is beginning to look dated and you want to clean up some old content. You decide to really clean the attic and remove old pages, rename most of the existing pages, and change the overall site structure completely around. When the dust settles you're left with a trim and very well organized website with easy to read file names.

The Reality: That clean-up may have just killed your website (at least, for the short term). Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes a webmaster can do is to remove or rename existing WebPages, especially when you have a well established website. What you're doing is essentially removing your website from the search engines. For example, let's say you have a webpage on your site about Puppy Grooming. It's an old page that was there since your site launched a few years back. From your knowledge, it's a page that doesn't get much traffic so you decide to delete it in the cleanup. What you've just done is created a hole in your website. If a user searches under Puppy Grooming and sees your page listed (it will still be indexed and in the cache of search engines) what do you think will happen when they click the link? Most likely they'll see an ugly 404 Page Error. That's not exactly what you want the user to see. It takes a user less than a second to determine if they want to visit your site so first impressions are everything in this business. More importantly, you’re throwing off the search engines that are caching and indexing your website! You risk going from top-ten placements on some pages to falling off the search engine results page altogether. Doing site cleanup of existing pages needs to really be a well thought out process to avoid any potential pitfalls.

This list wasn't compiled by pulling ideas from thin air. It's based on a foundation of past experiences by several professional web developers. After all, even the best web developers were once newbie’s too. By reading about these potential pitfalls we hope that you'll learn from the experiences of others and not make the same mistakes.

Free Links Direct SEO Team
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