13 Ways to Sabotage Your SEO Opportunities - WebProNews Insider, Michael Murray

[weegillis]

This article by Michael Murray seems to have slipped under the radar of WPW members. It very candidly lists the most likely culprits in many people's failed attempts to reach the summit of SEO.

1. Bring in an SEO specialist after the fact.
2. Not understanding the difference between keyword research and keyword selection.
3. Picking the wrong domain name.
4. Having no sense of ranking analysis.
5. Failure to create compelling content.
6. Decorating the website with graphic headers.
7. Preoccupation with social media.
8. Long-Short Page Syndrome.
9. Whacky page titles.
10. Inbound Link Void.
11. Misdiagnosing the competition.
12. Unwilling to spend money.
13. Terrible Calls to Action.

Read the complete article, here,
WebProNews, September 10, 2010, 13 Ways to...

A new topic thread in SEO 101 could be started for each of the points in Michael's list, they are all so glaringly true.

[mcrsteel]

#6- I had to go read your article to understand that you meant headlines (H tags).

[mjtaylor]

#6- I had to go read your article to understand that you meant headlines (H tags).

I had to think a minute why you might not have understood #6 right away. I guess you've never noticed how often webmasters use graphics for headings instead of text in wrapped in heading tags?

[morestar]

Good post weegillis, it gives me a chance to break some stuff down a bit...

OK I'd like to know who the person is that is sabotaging their SEO opportunities? Is it the hired SEO, the web team or the website owner?

If it were the SEO, that person obviously isn't an SEO, if it's the web team, they aren't looking for the opportunity and if it's the website owner, he's sabatoged nothing because a. she/he's not an SEO and b. all he needs to do is hire an SEO.

A new topic thread in SEO 101 could be started for each of the points in Michael's list, they are all so glaringly true.

The graphical header point is not true at all. A graphic at the top of a page isn't going to steer anyone's SEO efforts in the wrong direction - basically if the SEO has some muster, a graphical image as a header is nothing short of a minor hurdle to overcome. If it's necessary to have an H1 tag on the page them make sure it's placed at the start of the content at the very least - depending on the severity of the competition of the keywords i question. In other words, one can easily work around it. You don't need to get rid of a header simple to increase your rankings or traffic.

7. Preoccupation with social media.
Social media should be a part of any online marketing strategy. If you spend too much time in social circles, you can fail to overcome technical and text content challenges.

This isn't true either. A company could have one person assigned strickly to SEO and another assigned only to social marketing. If the social marketing and SEO strategies are working as planned well, everything is working.

If you're a one man army and you're website is ranked #1 for many of your terms then by all means, get into the social sphere and shake things up until your satisfied. Plus social marketing has nothing to do with SEO so in essence he's saying, SEO is the most important aspect of a web project and that you could be spending "too much time" on virtually everything else - which isn't true.

I'm such a critic of SEO articles, even though I've written a few shabby ones myself.

[briguy]

If I may be so bold..
#14 Not joining the right SEO forums...like I did!

[khurramali]

interesting Observations. outsourcing seo versus learning it and doing it inhouse is the question which comes to my mind.

[confettiguru]

I think that understanding what SEO is comes before deciding who does it is important
It's hard to delegate what you don't know.