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Top Bloggers Making Critical SEO Marketing Mistakes

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Recently we used Website Grader, a free SEO tool, to do some analysis of the top 20 bloggers (according to Technorati).  I expected to find a number of very well optimized websites that were doing all the basic things right.  I thought I would have examples of websites that do a really good job of SEO and Internet marketing to look up to.  But no... what I found was that the top bloggers are making critical SEO marketing mistakes.  You can view the full report using this link - SEO Capabilities of the Top 20 Bloggers.

Here are the top mistakes the best bloggers in the world are making, along with what each of these stats means and some reasons why these things are important:

1) 40% of the top bloggers do not have a 301 redirect.
This really is a pretty basic SEO best practice.  What this means is that your website will not allow people to visit the same content on a page with and without the "www" in the URL.  There are a couple reasons this is bad.  First, you are potentially dividing the power and reputation you receive from your inbound links to two different URLs or websites, because search engine databases typically see "www.companyURL.com" and "companyURL.com" as different URLs, since they are literally different.  Second, you are potentially telling the search engines that you have multiple pages with the same content, which is something they frown upon and can penalize you for.

To find out if your website has a 301 redirect, run a report using the Website Grader SEO tool.  If you are missing the 301 redirect, a big red box will appear in the report telling you that you are missing the redirect.

2) 65% of the top bloggers are missing description meta data.
This is actually even easier to fix than the 301 redirect.  The "page description" is metadata (data that is part of the page but not viewable to a user visiting the page) that tells the search engines how you would like to describe the content of the page.  When you don't have a description on a page, this means that when search engines look for how you would like your website to be described in the search they don't find anything.  So they make up their own answer.  Sometimes what they make up is OK, but frankly, I would much prefer to write my own description of my company than hope that some search engine software gets it right.  As an example, below is an image of our company's internet marketing website in the search results, the description is highlighted in the yellow box.  This description is found in the source code of our website home page.

3) 80% of the top bloggers are missing keyword metadata.
OK, now I know some SEO gurus will start to complain that keyword metadata doesn't matter.  Sure, keyword metadata is not even close to the most important factor in SEO.  But, the field is there, you might as well use it, right?  I really think there is no reason to leave it completely blank, you need to take advantage of every opportunity you have.  For those of you who are not SEO gurus, the keywords metadata is liek the description metadata.  It is text that is part of the code of your webpage but is not viewable by website visitors.  This data is not used by many search engines, or if it is used it is not a very important factor.  However, it is still another opportunity to tell the search engines what your web page is about, so you really should use it.  And I do think it is shocking that almost all of the top bloggers have a completely blank keyword field.

Now, all of the SEO mistakes of the top bloggers are making certainly do not detract from their success.  They measure RSS subscribers in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, and this blog only has about 1500 RSS subscribers (so far!  help me out and signup now).  But, in my mind, there is no excuse for doing these basic things wrong.  They are not hard to fix, and they are all generally recognized Internet marketing best practices.  And I bet if they fixed these things they would get more traffic from search engines which should help increase their traffic and readership.

What are your thoughts?  Leave a comment below and let's discuss.

Posted by Mike Volpe on Wed, Oct 03, 2007 @ 06:01 AM