Top 5 SEO Fails Webinar and Q&A

I conducted an SEO party (AKA Q&A Webinar) a few days ago and wanted to share some SEO tips with you especially if you missed the webinar.

Here, I take several SEO questions from the webinar participants and describe what I call the top 5 SEO Fails a website author or blogger should avoid.

So What are the Top 5 SEO Fails You Should Avoid?

1) Bad URL Structure – Set Up Good a Permalinks Structure

When web content authors begin to blog not much consideration is given to the structure of the URL.  If you have a website that has several solid categories and you’re not using it in your URL you might be shooting yourself in the foot.  A good URL incorporates a category and is keyword rich.

Example URL:  www.domain.com/category/keyword-rich-url-here

Newer bloggers are less aware of this issue.  If you are on WordPress, as I am, you can fix this issue by going to your WordPress settings and then “permalinks.”  You should update your permalinks like so:

/%category%/%postname%/

2) Fail to Link Internally and Externally – Build Deep Links Within and Link Out

To help Google crawl your content and associate your website as valuable, you should develop deep links to your content.  Whether you link to previous blog articles or other pages on your site.  Make it a point to link internally every time you publish a new piece of content. You can do this with the help of WordPress plugins like the Insights plugin.

A nice feature on many blogs is a “Related Posts/Articles” section at the end of the blog article.  This helps you link your own content together in a meaningful way and may also encourage your visitors to stick around to engage with your content and read more!

3) Too Little Content or Too Much Content that is Disorganized and Inaccessible

Google needs content to index, so do your best to set a publishing schedule to add new content on a regular basis.  If your site is still an infant, make sure to nurture it with additional content.  Of course, you will need to implement SEO basics as you publish.  On the other side, if you have a large website, which you’ve added tons of content to over the years, you may have a monster site that needs organization (to include a clean category structure and keyword targeting).

4) SEO Fail – Lack of Focus

When most content authors begin blogging, they do not bust out the business blog planning worksheet and begin planning away.  Often times we start a blog as an outlet to communicate.  Or we start a blog to share the knowledge we have acquired in a specific field or industry, but we don’t plan how to publish that content. What we end up creating is good content that might lack focus, organization and a clear content marketing strategy.  Plan to publish content in chunks that are relevant to one another.  Buckle down and write down some ideas to tie your content together and make it more focused.

5) Don’t Fail to Get Social – You Need Social Integration

This is to become more important as we move into 2012.  The more social you can get your content to become the better.  How can content become social?  Well first you have to share it.  Don’t be shy about sharing your own content, but don’t spam your social networks either.  Social media tools like Hootsuite will allow you to schedule a series of tweets be shared on your social networks.  Space it out.  But always ensure your visitors can also share your content easily.

Have the Tweet, Facebook, Google+ buttons at a minimum.  Make it easy for others to share your valuable information, ideas, and content.  The more it is shared, the more likely you are to attract natural links to your content.  Also, Google is now indexing content that is shared on it’s own social network, Google+, via Google Plus Your World.

The more you use Google+, the more your photo will start to appear in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

Get social and develop your social media marketing strategy.   Social and SEO are intertwining.

Happy SEOing!

About The Author

Dali Burgado, also known as "The Dali Blogger" teaches creative entrepreneurs how to carve a web presence that connects with their Inner Guru and their target audience. Her first online marketing love is SEO. She's an avid connector on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. When she's not coaching or teaching, she's tweaking sites for Search Engine Visibility, working on her PHP and Javascript coding skills, Singing Opera, or learning about gardening. Circle Dali on Google+