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Title:
5 common mistakes in SEO (and 6 good ideas!)
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Description:
Maile Ohye from Google covers the five most common errors
she finds in SEO, and then concludes with six quick tips to make sure you're on the right track.
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I'm Maile Ohye.
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I work at Google as a Developer
Programs Tech Lead,
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normally from our headquarters
in Mountain View, California.
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But today, I'm at home in San
Francisco to talk about the
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five most common mistakes
I find in SEO.
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Mistake number one is working on
SEO before your site has a
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value proposition.
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Ask yourself, why would
a user choose my
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site and search results?
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Let's say you have a site that
promotes your offline
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business, like a local
bike repair shop.
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What differentiates your
business from your
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competitors?
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Are you a nonprofit
organization?
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Or perhaps you offer free
estimates, a free demo, or
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you're the oldest independent
dealer in the city.
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Or if you're an e-commerce site,
what separates your site
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from the others?
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Do you have lower prices, free
shipping, great customer
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service, or better product
descriptions?
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Starting with a value
proposition, simplifies SEO.
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No matter where your site ranks
in search results, if
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you want to stay on top,
searchers need a value prop to
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click on your site, to come back
and revisit your site,
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and to recommend your site
to their friends.
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Start with a value prop, and
then focus on a quality user
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experience.
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Let's move to mistake
number two, a
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segmented approach to SEO.
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I call this the bento box
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approach, because I'm Japanese.
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And it's like your dinner
plate, with every item
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segmented and none of
it working together.
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It's great for your sushi
and your salad.
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It's not as great when there
is no communication between
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your marketing, bizdev,
and SEO teams.
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So mistake number two is about
working on SEO in a silo.
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A better, more holistic approach
to SEO is to consider
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the entire user experience, from
marketing campaign all
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the way to the actual conversion
and potentially
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repeat business.
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Vanessa Fox, a consultant and
author on search engine
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strategy, wrote about this type
of bento box approach
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with respect to the Superbowl,
when it's difficult for
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companies to completely
integrate their offline
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television ads with their
online SEO efforts.
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She noted that a car company
spent millions on TV ads to
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lead users to a website,
edityourown.com, where they
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could then edit their
own car video.
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On Superbowl Sunday, this
commercial probably not only
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brought users to the website,
but actually helped the query,
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edityourown, to rank number
36 on Google Hot Trends.
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Now, imagine if this
were your company.
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As the SEO, you can't just focus
on your regular keywords
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that you do every day.
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But you also need to integrate
marketing campaigns and
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optimize for the words
"edityourown."
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Mistake number three is
putting effort into
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time-consuming workarounds,
rather than researching new
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features or best practices that
can simplify your tasks.
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For example, for sites with
paginated content, in the past
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some webmasters tried the
workaround of using
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rel="canonical" on subsequent
pages to their page one.
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This unfortunately can
cause a loss of
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content in Google's index.
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The good news is that there
are new best practices.
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We now support rel="next"
and rel="prev" markup.
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So your paginated article or
product category is treated as
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a single series, rather than
having page rank diluted into
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the various components.
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Also in the past, to have
several new or updated pages
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crawled as quickly as possible,
web masters might
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have performed the lengthy task
of updating their site
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map with the new URLs, then
uploading the new site map
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file, and then submitting
it to Google.
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But in 2011, we expanded
Webmaster Tools "Fetch as
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Googlebot" so that, per week,
you can submit up to 500 new
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or updated URLs that you'd like
to be crawled or up to 10
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URLs that you'd like crawled,
along with their linked pages.
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When submitting through "Fetch
as Gogglebot," most URLs are
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crawled within 24 hours.
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An easy way to stay in touch
of new features and best
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practices is to subscribe to
the Webmaster Central Blog.
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Now, while mistake number three
is about time-consuming
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workarounds, often because an
SEO isn't as up to date,
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mistake number four is along
a similar spectrum.
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But now it's getting caught
in SEO trends.
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In the early days of search
engines, both webmasters and
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search engines chased
the user.
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We were running the same
race, get more users
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to visit and convert.
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Then, as the market matured,
things went a little crazy.
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It was as if this race split
into two simultaneous races.
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And rather than chasing users,
some websites started chasing
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search engine algorithms.
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In over six years at Google,
I've seen SEO trends take many
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forms. Around 2005, SEOs lost
focus and spent countless
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hours editing their content
for the optimal keyword
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density, meaning key
words per page.
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Not a great use their time.
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Instead, they could have better
spent their time making
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their content readable,
compelling, and informative.
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I'm sure you have a long list
of tasks for your site.
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Try to avoid the SEO trends,
and instead prioritize the
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tasks that will bring
lasting value.
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Finally, this brings
us to mistake
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number five, slow iteration.
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At Google, we've been know to
say that the main constant in
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SEO is that it's constantly
evolving.
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The faster your team is able
to iterate, the better.
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A good recipe is to, one, define
metrics for success.
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Then two, implement
improvements.
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Next, measure the impact, and
then create new improvements.
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And then last, prioritize those
improvements based on
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the market and your
team's personnel.
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And then, of course, repeat.
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The advantage to having
an agile SEO
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cycle is quite clear.
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In 2009, we launched
Rich Snippets.
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Recipe or event sites that
could iterate quickly and
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implement the proper markup
could now show much more
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appealing search results.
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The same was true of video
sites that were able to
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quickly create and submit
video site maps.
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Again, those who are agile
could get the benefits.
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Those are the five most common
SEO mistakes that I find.
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But now, let's cover good
practices in SEO.
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First, do something cool.
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Have a value proposition that
separates you from your
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competitors.
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Second, include relevant
keywords in your copy.
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There's no need to think
about keyword density.
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But make sure your content
includes the keywords people
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actually search for.
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Three, be smart about your
tags, title tags and
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meta-description tags, and
your site architecture.
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Four, sign up for email
forwarding in Webmaster Tools.
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This allows important messages
from Google, such as
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notifications for crawl issues,
to be forwarded
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directly to the inbox you
check regularly, whether
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that's your work account
inbox, Yahoo, or Gmail.
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Five, attract buzz.
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This helps bring natural links,
great reviews, votes,
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+1s, and follows.
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And last, stay fresh
and relevant.
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Perhaps expand your reach to
social media sites, if that's
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a great place to reach
your audience.
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Or make sure your site is
accessible on smartphones, if
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your product is great
on the go.
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I hope this video helps you
avoid the common SEO mistakes
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and instead, focus on the good
practices that can bring
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lasting, positive benefits.
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Thanks for watching.
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