The top online faux pas

Make no mistake, Web marketing is, well, a tangled web. Designing a site that serves business needs and customer needs, and converts and drives, revenue is challenging enough. But mastering the online channels that drive customers to a site is a monumental undertaking.

The different disciplines of e-commerce are related and intertwined, and they should work together to send consistent messages. But each contains unique elements that make managing them all according to best practices even more challenging.

These are just a few of our favorite faux pas that Web marketers make.

SEO SLIP-UPS

Search engine optimization requires thinking about the structural and content signals that a site sends in a way very different from what marketers and designers are used to thinking. If a site can't speak to search engines in a way that the engines understand and value, they won't refer human searchers to the site.

1. Designing uncrawlable navigation

   PAID SEARCH SPOILERS

   Search engine spiders don't navigate like humans. They don't use JavaScript, cookies, forms, filtering drop downs or CSS. They can't “see” content in images, video and Flash.

   Today's crawlers exist in a world of plain text and HTML. Try turning off your JavaScript, cookies, images and CSS. If you can't understand what's on the page or how to navigate around the site, neither can search engines. No crawl = no indexation = no rankings = no natural search-referred traffic = no natural search-referred sales.

2. Thinking Google can't see what you're hiding

   SOCIAL MEDIA MISTAKES

   Search engines have access to a wealth of information, from every piece of crawlable content on every Website to the registration and hosting information for every site on the planet. If a company owns 300 domains and they all link to one another, search engines can see that.

   Know that if a site uses CSS to hide “keyword-rich SEO content” from humans 999 pixels off the visible page, or to render the visibility as “hidden” on the page, search engines are beginning to identify and use this information as well. Sites that think they're hiding secret tactics will eventually be unpleasantly surprised.

3. Offering undifferentiated content

   BLOGGING BLUNDERS

   Every unique page of content has a chance to rank for a unique keyword or phrase, if that unique page sends keyword signals for that unique keyword or phrase. Without significant differentiation from page to page, you're likely to get caught up in Google's duplicate content filter.

   Title tags are the most frequent offenders. Many sites have the same title tag on every page of the site, or on every page in a category. The title tag sends the strongest on-page keyword signal to the search engines; if the page has a unique reason to exist, then the title tag needs to send that unique keyword signal.

   If the page doesn't have a unique reason to exist, its probably duplicate content — the same content at a different URL. Sites have a better chance of ranking well when they send one unique keyword signal for every one unique page of content, residing at one unique URL.

4. Failing to speak the searchers' language

   Each site has a style and a brand that it wants to represent, a way of talking about the products or content it offers. When this language is different from a searcher's language, engines can't match up the searcher with that site's product.

   For example, a designer clothing site may offer a product called a “maxi cardi.” Jane Searcher wants a “long gray cashmere cardigan sweater.” Unless the clothing site adds descriptive language to its nomenclature, Jane Searcher is not likely to find or purchase the “maxi cardi,” even though it is exactly what would fulfill her search for a long, gray cashmere cardigan sweater.

5. Wasting link popularity from discontinued products

   Every merchant has products that cycle on and off the site. More popular products have likely naturally gained some links from bloggers and media sites over their lifespans.

   Most merchants replace discontinued product content with a message stating that the product is no longer offered, but the URL returns a 404 File Not Found server status. Or it continues to return a 200 OK server status. That link popularity could be harnessed and channeled back to a major category or the home page simply through a permanent redirect from the discontinued URLs. The discontinued URLs would be cleared from the engines' indexes, with the PageRank being passed to current products.

Marketers love paid search because it's easy to budget for and the return on investment is easy to track. But you can't simply “set it and forget it.” Just as you need to continually optimize for natural search, you must continually optimize your PPC campaigns — the keywords, the ads, the landing pages, and more.

1. Targeting overly broad keywords

   Broad match provides an easy way to get started with PPC advertising, but will generally result in high impressions, low conversions and significant expense. Focusing on the right “long tail” keywords will lower the spend while increasing conversion.

   You can find long tail keywords — assuming you are doing conversion tracking — in many places, including search engine referrals and internal search logs.

   For instance, use a search analytics package such as Enquisite to identify terms that are high performing on one engine (e.g.,Yahoo), but are nonexistent on the other (e.g. Google). Then buy those keywords on the nonperforming engine.

   Also, be sure to define as comprehensive a list of “negative keywords” as possible. These are terms that don't convert — perhaps “free” or “stock.” Google allows you to define up to 10,000 of them in an ad group. You won't be able to make use of all 10,000 unless you use automation, such as a system from Epiar.

2. Killing off your nonbrand keywords

   Marketers may be tempted to stop buying generic unbranded keywords because the branded keywords seem to perform so much better — in terms of bringing in highly converting traffic. This is a mistake, however.

   Bear in mind that customers may have clicked through on the first visit on a competitive, nonbrand search, then left to research other options, and finally returned on a navigational search to complete their purchases. If full credit is given to the final, brand keyword, you won't understand — or appreciate — which nonbrand keywords do the business for you.

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