• by Christopher Peer , April 2, 2010

You've researched and implemented all the latest SEO best practices. Your graphics are stunning, your products beautifully photographed and well organized. Your web site's code is crisp and clean, title tags descriptive and unique to each page. Your content is keyword rich. You've done away with unnecessary, flash-heavy landing pages and JavaScript navigation schemes. Yet your site is not ranking well in organic search results, and it's not converting visitors into customers.

 

Sometimes it can seem like you're doing everything right but you don't get the expected results. When this occurs, it's time to take a closer look at some issues that can frequently undermine an otherwise sound strategy.

Common mistakes:

• Insufficient Back Links.
  Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving process. What was true even as recently as three or four months ago may no longer be as valid as it once was -- if at all. One factor, though, that has remained fairly constant is the importance of back links. Your web site can follow every other optimization rule in the book and still be invisible to search engines if you fail to have a sufficient number of out bound links from quality web sites (page rank 4 or higher) linking back to it.  According to a survey on seomoz.org, 7 percent of respondents rated external link popularity as "of very high importance" in terms of top 5 ranking factors.

• Your Content Does Not Provide Value.
  Is your content giving your visitors the valuable information they presumably came to your site to find or is it merely a keyword-stuffed assemblage of sentences with generic information that can be found anywhere else?

• No Clear Call to Action
  Is it obvious to the visitor what action they're expected to take? Has that action been made easy to determine and perform? It's amazing how often this simple rule is overlooked. Don't expect your visitors to spend their valuable time hunting around your page looking for that tiny little link to the contact form or white paper. If they can't easily find what they're looking for, they'll leave without taking an action and go somewhere else. It's that simple. You can also have too many calls to action; this can cause confusion. Keep focused on one clear objective and make that as easy as possible to understand and for your potential customers to perform.

.       Inappropriate PPC Ad/Keyword or Landing Page
If you're running a pay-per-click campaign, are your ads promising one thing, then taking the visitor to a landing page that's about something else? Many pay-per-click campaign managers make the mistake of bringing all visitors to the site through the web site's front door. Conversions will improve dramatically if the user is taken directly to the interior page containing the product or information to which the ad refers.

·        Insufficient Establishment of Credibility
Unless you're already a well-known company, visitor trust is not something that should be taken for granted. You need to establish that you are not only reputable, but that you are also a leader in your field. You can do this through publishing white papers, posting authoritative commentary on relevant blogs, and by using testimonials.  If you have awards and/or business certifications such as being a member in good standing of the Better Business Bureau, it's a good idea to include them somewhere prominently on the Web site.

Eliminating these types of mistakes from your web site will help ensure that all your hard work doesn't go to waste.