We all make mistakes but when it comes to our online web businesses, it’s important that we fix our mistakes before they become crippling.

Keywords

A keyword (or Tag in WordPress lingo) is a word or phrase intended to help support the content that you’re reading on a specific page, not the entire website. People often overload pages with keywords which have no relevancy to the page they’re designing with the hopes that Google will fall for the trick. Google will not fall for it. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to show that Google will punish you for using unrelated keywords, which is mistake #1 on most websites.

Boring Content

Content matters, it’s a silly reality but you have to stop thinking about your visitors as a funny little line in an analytics program and begin caring about them as people. Every person who comes to your website should feel they are better off after reading your content. If they don’t you’re wasting their time and they will not come back, so write better content and watch your website traffic increase dramatically.

Failing to Reach Your Market

The old days of building a website and assuming people will find it are over (if they ever existed at all), website owners  need to tell people about their website and promote it everywhere. Make sure your site address is on your business cards, marketing materials, the side of your building, company vehicles, all of your online profiles and in prominent newsletters, magazines etc. Remember, if you don’t tell people about your website they won’t know it’s there.

Poor Titles

Writing for websites is easy, make sure you have a catchy title that will help people determine if they want to read your piece and then make sure it’s been properly placed in your HTML code. A great title needs to be in two places on a website, first it has to be in the <title></title> tags of your page but it should also be reflected in your <h1></h1> tags in the body of your content. This helps search engines know that your page is about your title by labeling the document but also by placing the title in an easy to read and powerful tag within your text.

Poor Structure

Web pages are a lot like books, they need structure for people to be able to read them. In this case, you want computer software such as FireFox, Safari and IE to read your pages as well as Google, MSN and Yahoo right? Well then, you’d better make sure your page is coded to their standards! Luckily, the W3C has a wonderful tool to help you ensure your page can be properly read.

Stale Content

If you’ve follow my advice, you know that your visitors are people not mindless data points on a graph so you have to respect that they simple won’t come back to your website if you don’t take the time to post anything new there. Work out a schedule that you can keep and write a blog posting at least once each week (more if you can) to provide your audience with fresh content.

Be Organic

While it’s acceptable and even encouraged to buy ads on services such as Google be careful that you’re building your client base through organic methods, not paid advertising. Google looks very poorly on paid link placement and has a reputation for punishing people excessively for buying links. If you really want to build your websites online reputation, do it honestly and take a little more time, in the end it’ll get you where you need to be.

Be Original

The web is a very big place and people have a lot of choice when it comes to content, so try to be original and write content people want to read. Ask yourself why you read specific websites and learn to improve your content to ensure people have a reason to come back. Once you have unique, original content others will start linking to your content because you’re an authority.

SEO is Irrelevant

Would you rather optimize your store for the local newspaper or for your customer? Stop looking to optimize your content for search engines, they’re irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong you have to make sure your content can be read by them and that your website is compatible with Google but stop treating your website content like it needs to be written to appeal to the big search engines and instead, write your content to appeal to people like your mother, your father, your kids and your neighbors. After all, they’re the ones who are reading your content … not a robot. 

Learn to be co-operative

The biggest mistake people make? Failing to ask other website owners to link to them. Search engines rankings work on a system called PageRank, the way PageRank works is by counting the number of links from other websites to your website, the more links you have coming into your website … the higher you rank on Google. If you want to be successful on the web, ask your friends and family as well as other related businesses to link to you.