3 Deadly Search Engine Marketing Sins

My inbox this week provided glaring examples of three all too common rookie search engine marketing mistakes. What you could call three deadly search engine marketing sins. Inadequate Keyword Research Hey! If you're going to spend hours developing a web site, isn't it smart to invest some time to insure you're focusing on the most traffic laden keywords? Especially when typically the plural form of a keyword phrase generates way more traffic than the singular form. For example "dog dishes" rather than "dog dish". Yet just this week I was asked to look at a site that had focused on the singular form. Evidently the owner hadn't bothered to do any digging to make sure that was their best keyword move. Look, you'll never know for sure unless you research it. Besides, you can access Wordtracker, the tool of choice for what? a measly $7 a day. Even better here's a quick and dirty way to get the most out of that day. Search for your target keyword in Google. Visit the top ranking sites. Use the "View Source" feature of Internet Explorer to check out the keyword meta tag of each site. You're looking for a site listing lots of keywords there. Do this with each of the top listings or until you find one stuffed to the gills with keywords. Ah-ha! There's your starting point for your list of likely keyword phrases. Repeat with a couple of other sites and you'll soon have a long list of candidates to check out in Wordtracker. Enhance your list further using this tool: Site Bloat Twice this week I was asked to look at sites that would have let me read War and Peace while waiting for them to come up. And no visitor is going to have a copy of that handy. To avoid losing any precious visitors lose the huge graphics. One of the sites had a graphic 501K in size! No wonder it took nearly two minutes to load up on a 56K modem. Then too lose the Flash - unless you have a very good reason for using it. Even then lose the Flash. If you're wondering how your site's download time measures up test it here: