Top 10 Reasons Your SEO Efforts are Failing

10. Hard to Navigate Site: You can have the best content on the web, but if visitors to your site can’t access it quickly, and that means literally within seconds, they will leave. Organize your website logically and use a site map to help customers get around more easily.

9. Submitting Your URL to Multiple Search Engines: Sites like Google and Yahoo! use web-crawlers to find and rank pages, the long and short of that is they will find and rank your site better if you establish one or more quality links to already existing web sites.

8. Leaving Keywords out of the Site’s Actual Content: It’s great to include keywords in page titles and meta-tags, but don’t forget to use them as the focus of your site’s content. Keywords are just that, they describe and sum up what you are selling. Put them throughout your site wherever they can be used logically.

7. Link Spamming: Links on blogs, forums, or—even worse—link farms don’t help a site’s search rating. Search engines like Yahoo! or Google will ban a site for this, so focus on getting a few quality links to legitimate sites instead of many links that basically amount to spam.

6. Using Meta-Tags Incorrectly: Meta-tags don’t hold nearly the importance that they used to, so don’t rely on them to get your page a good ranking. Focus instead on generating strong, keyword centered content for your site, with quality links to similar or related websites. At the same time, they’re there, so use them correctly, matching them to the specific keywords that best describe your content.

5. A Bad URL: There’s a reason companies spend millions on buying up short three or four letter URLs. No amount of SEO work can fully compensate for a bad URL, so choose a short, concise, and catchy address for your site.

4. Using the Wrong Keywords: It doesn’t matter what words you think best describe your site, it only matters what the average person will type into a search engine to find it. Keywords need to be common, accessible, and geared to the layman.

3. Sub-par Content: Using SEO to bring traffic to your website is great, but there needs to be quality content for the visitors when they arrive. Badly written, unfocused, or boring websites can have all the visitor’s they want—it won’t translate to sales.

2. Poor Outsourcing: If you’re outsourcing your site’s content, ensure that the company you choose employs professional writers and native language speakers of your site’s primary language. Poorly phrased, awkward content alienates visitors quickly.

1. Not Keeping Up: Never rest on your site’s high ranking. Constantly updated, quality content, with focused keywords, is the only way to ensure you stay at the top of the food chain.