Tattoos and Body Art

4 Ways to Screw Up Your SEO   by Carter Schimpff

These days, SEO is serious business. Not just for the SEO firms themselves, but also in terms of the impact good or bad SEO can have on your company’s bottom line. SEO done right can open the virtual flood-gates; SEO done wrong can cement them shut forever.

For this reason and many others (chief among them the labor-intensity of running a good and proper SEO campaign), it’s always worth the money to hire a professional firm to do the job right the first time. But let’s assume that for one reason or another you’re going to try and run your own SEO campaign — here are seven things to absolutely avoid.

1. Forgetting to implement a “robots.txt” file.

Your robots.txt file is what tells a Search Engine’s spiders and crawlers (the little snippets of code that sniff around the internet figuring things out and collecting information) what to look at on your website, and what not to look at on your website. Some of you are probably saying, “But Carter, don’t I want Search Engines to look at every page on my website?”

Off the cuff, the answer is an emphatic yes. Take into consideration, though, all of the incidentals associated with most websites — contact pages, web forms, legal information, privacy policies, etc. You actually want Search Engines to ignore these sort of pages. Why? Because these are “standard” pages — pages that most other websites will also have — and because those pages aren’t designed to be specifically about your company and your products.

Do you want Google basing your website’s ranking on the text found in your “Legal” page? Do you want Google to think that “contact us” is one of the key phrases that you’re trying to compete and be ranked for? Of course not — for this reason, we exclude them in the robots.txt file.

2. Blind Link Building

At this point, almost everyone understands the importance of having other websites link back to their website. What not everyone understand is that in the world of link building, more is not necessarily better. In fact, even one backlink from the wrong site, or one reciprocal link from your site to the wrong site, can absolutely kill your rankings (at best) and get your site banned entirely from the search engines (at worst).

When you first start your SEO campaign, it’s incredibly tempting to accept every reciprocal link request that comes your way and stuff your website and the internet full of reciprocal links and backlinks. After all, you’d plaster every building in the city with your company’s fliers if you could, wouldn’t you?

Here’s where that analogy goes wrong. Imagine the actual repercussions of plastering every building in the city with your company’s fliers. Most importantly, whether you like it or not, your company’s brand and image will be in some way associated with the building that it shows up in. Are you sure you want your company’s name plastered all over a crack den? Or a meth lab? A chop shop? Hopefully you’re beginning to get the idea. Where you link and who links back to you works in a very similar way. You want only upstanding, related websites linking to you, and you only want to link to those sorts of websites.

Continuing the analogy, littering an entire city with fliers is almost always going to be against the law. And if you’re out there throwing your fliers around pell-mell, guess how long it’s going to take city authorities to zero in on your company and start levying some fines? In this case, Search Engines are “the authorities,” and they will find you, and they will make you pay.

3. Being too General With Your Keywords and Phrases

90 percent of the time, when we start working with a new SEO client on keywords and key phrases, they want way too many keywords, and the keywords that they want are way too broad. A general rule of thumb is to choose no more than three to five keywords or key phrases to focus on — any more than that, and the search engines are going to have a hard time deciding on what search terms you want to be ranked for; as a consequence, you won’t get ranked highly for any of your keywords or phrases.

By the same token, be as specific as possible with your keywords and key phrases. If you’re a florist in Beaumont, Texas, your first instinct is to want to be ranked highly for the keyword “florist”. If you decided to take that route, I’m warning you now, it’ll be a waste of your time. With huge competitors like ProFlowers and 1-800-Flowers out there spending millions every year on internet marketing and SEO campaigns, there’s no possible way that you’ll ever compete with them for as broad a term as “florist”.

Instead, think smaller. Think local. Using our example, do a search for “Beaumont Texas florists”. You’re going to find far fewer competitors for that search term and you’ll be doing a better job of zeroing in on your local market. Always remember that old business axiom: you can’t conquer the world until you’ve conquered your own neighborhood.

4. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is exactly what it sounds like — it’s the act of packing and cramming your keywords and phrases everywhere you can possibly fit them on your website, regardless of whether or not they make sense. This can hurt you on two levels:

1. Your website will look like it’s been written by a fifth grader. If you stumbled across a website like that, would you be more likely to find it legitimate and trustworthy, or would you more likely think that it was some sort of joke or scam?

2. Google and other Search Engines will penalize the living daylights out of your website for keyword stuffing. Your website will never again see the tenth search results page, let alone the first.

If you’re wondering how not to screw this up, let’s talk about keyword density. Keyword density (sometimes abbreviated simply to “KD”) is a metric that measures what percentage of the entire copy (text) on a webpage your keywords account for. For example, if one of your web pages has 500 words on it and 50 of those words are your chosen keywords, that page has a KD of 10 percent. Optimal KD for most webpages is between 3 percent-5 percent, and the maximum KD before you start to see penalization hovers somewhere around 8 percent.

About the Author

For more marketing advice for your small business, visit the small business marketing blog at Small Business Web Design. Carter Schimpff is the President and Owner of Garraty Group Marketing, Ltd., a Fort Worth-based firm specializing in small business web design.
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