Five Most Disastrous Mistakes a Webmaster Can Make

Posted on June 5th, 2010
A blog post by DN (1 Comment)

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a new webmaster, these five mistakes are very easy to do. Those honey-would-you-do-this’, phone rings, or running children can divert your focus.

1) Poor Title and Headings

Maybe nobody would ever look closely to the page title and heading when surfing the web but it can be the most captivating part of your site. Big, bold text with catchy words may catch user attention when they scan your pages. Just arrange your main keywords into something attractive and you’ll see a noticeable improvement on your traffic. Once the page is indexed by search engine and you have a steady traffic to a page, never change the title even when you’ve come up with something much better, your may rank far worse and will never recover your traffic level.

That said, keyword significance is an important consideration and your keywords need to be included inside the title tag. Significance means how close a keyword describe your content. Make sure you weed out any inessential words, shorten the title, so it is interesting enough to draw more clicks.

Headings that explain the paragraphs and sentences below them are very important since people scan web pages and stop only when they find something fascinating. Too much bold text is often a bad idea; you should use bold text only for headings, which can be useful to preserve user interest on your page.

2) Bad Navigation

If you start to organize your site only after developing five hundred pages then you are in deep trouble. There are sites with interesting content, but unable to allow users to move deeper into the site conveniently.

Often the most obvious navigation tool when dealing with a badly-designed site is the browser’s BACK button. This is one of the reasons why each unique IP visit results in only one pageview, your visitors don’t have a clue in how to explore the site.

Organize your site into logical subsets and divide subsets into sub-components. Be sure that you know why people are coming to your Web page and every time you make changes ask someone to find a specific information or product in your site using your modified navigation. This is web navigation 101. Even web sites with good navigation often use terms that visitors don’t easily understand.

People must be able to know what your site is all about. They also should understand what each site element means and know how to navigate the entire site easily. Remember, web users always scan pages.

3) Terrible Internal Linking

Ever heard about this? People often ask how to get all of their pages indexed, as in many cases only 20 to 50 percent of their sites are indexed by Google. Sure, external links and sitemaps are necessary and important but pages with one-way internal link tend to be ignored by search engines as the bots hate cul-de-sac. The bottom line is using natural internal linking for all your pages is essential. When you author a page about a specific topic, do a site-wide search for the same topic to find related web pages. Add relevant links from your older pages to your new page. This can be tedious, especially if you’re using static HTML site, however, popular CMS engines, such WordPress, have plugins to automatically display relevant internal pages at the bottom of each page.

4) Unorganized link building

Badly organized link building may work for you, if you’re dealing with questionable topics which are related to drugs, sex or others. But to be successful in the Internet, you should have relevant, quality backlinks. Reciprocal linking isn’t a bad thing assuming it is performed reasonably. Although it may have less SEO value, it can still provide steady stream of visitors from your partner sites. The sites you link to, whether they are reciprocal or not, should be quality sites that can offer relevant visitors. It is suggested that reciprocal inbound links should be no greater than twenty percent of your entire backlinks. PageRank is often proven to have little impact on traffic; in many cases your PageRank may drop during a quarterly update but the traffic continue to increase. Look around. You may find a PageRank 2 domain with 10,000 backlinks and a PageRank 4 domain with 2000 backlinks, but the first site seems to have better search engine position and more visitors, because the amount and the quality of backlinks are far more important than PageRank.

SEO isn’t a fixed science nor the only one way to be successful on the Internet, but you need to evaluate the competitors and defeat them; and if they’re too strong, outsmart them. Sure, with your limited budget it may seem impossible to gather hundred of thousands of inbound links just like those top sites, but if you can provide something unique, you may steal plenty of visitors.

5) Trash Content

Boring contents with commonly-known facts are deluging the cyberspace today. Never let your Web site go stale. Don’t just add new page only for the sake of updating your site. Be sure that your latest content is fresh, intriguing and won’t make visitors to hit the BACK button. New pages should be internally linked, shown on the main page, and include H1 tags and bold style that can catch the attention of scanning visitors. Any time you build a web page, determine your keywords and search them on the Google. Scan the first ten results, find ideas that grab your attention and also things that are not mentioned on them, use them to make unique and attractive content.