Last week we spoke about how important SEO is for your overall marketing strategy and how powerful it is over the long term to get you immense traffic and lots of conversions which will then lead to sales. We spoke about some common SEO barriers which can bury your website six feet deep into the ground and never let a single search engine see your site, ever. Let’s talk about a few more common SEO barriers here:
Even Search engines go for looks: It just takes a few milliseconds for your website visitors to make an impression on your website. Whether they will stay or go away is the crux here. If your website isn’t done well and is far from good looking, no one would want to stay. Improve your web credibility by making sure that you upload a professionally done website (ask us for help, we do this very well). Well-designed websites have historically proven to make more sales than non-professionally designed ones.
Focus is everything: When we need to buy something, we always prefer to go to specialists who are good at selling whatever it is we want specifically. Focus on selling just one thing on your website. A site that sells everything under the sun isn’t likely to make it big – unless you are another Amazon. However, if you can optimize each page, you may look to sell products related to your own or have an affiliate membership and promote related products that would be great for your already existing clientele.
Get your navigation right: The text on your navigation should be easily indexed by the search engines. From the user point of view, it should be made as simple and intuitive as possible. If the users has to search for information and has to click more than 3 times to get to the piece they want to read, it’s highly likely that you will lose your readers.
Duplicate content: There is a lot of discussion on this subject and hence a lot of confusion about. Let’s have it clear here, once and for all. Avoid exact or duplicates of your copy on multiple pages or URLs. Avoid duplicate titles, keywords, Meta descriptions and meta tags. Use may want to use the robots exclusion protocol if you think that a few pages do have content that has to be duplicated since this protocol can help to keep the spiders away from Indexing.
Too much of information abounds on the Internet about Search Engine Optimization and that is expected because SEO has remained rather mysterious because the dynamics of search change all the time. In spite of all that information made available to all of us, some of the basics are always forgotten and we are rather surprised that such simple steps are not even taken. Here are some of the core SEO barriers which are likely to stop your website from being found on SERPs:.gif)