Spending time looking critically at websites day in and day out, you begin to notice common themes emerging in terms of the mistakes that are made by site owners and we developers. Here are a few of the most common, and what you can do to avoid them.
Geolocation errors
Many people don’t realise that to target UK customers, then Google must recognise that your website is based in the UK. If you’re using a .co.uk domain then you’re almost certainly fine. If you’re using a generic domain such as a .com or .net then you must ensure that your hosting is UK based rather than in the US or Germany as happens often.
Additional Domains
Additional domains don’t mean additional traffic. Having 10 domains doesn’t mean you get 10 times the visitors or sales as you would expect with one site. In fact by dividing your marketing techniques over 10 sites rather than one, you’re probably diluting your efforts and actually reducing the potential traffic you’re receiving. Ensure any additional domains that you own are ‘301 redirected’ into your main domain to rectify this.
Failing To Optimise Internal pages
If only the homepage of your website is optimised for your keywords then you’ll be missing out on a huge proportion of your potential traffic. Each and every page on the site should be optimised for its own specific keywords.
Poor Navigation
Using search unfriendly technologies such as flash and javascript for your menus and navigation may well mean that search engine don’t even know about the majority of your internal pages. Thankfully this doesn’t happen so much anymore, but it’s always worth checking.