1. Sites Made Entirely Out Of Flash
As any SEO will tell you, or nearly any web designer with the slightest knowledge about the behavior of search engine spiders, designing a site entirely in flash is a recipe for disaster. As search engines become more sophisticated, the game of search engine optimization has become more complex….indeed, the process of becoming a highly ranked site has become quite a complex task.
2. Duplicate Content
For those sites not built entirely in flash, an even more ominous problem is usually lurking. Duplicate content is abhorred by search engines. As many may know, a great deal of keyword rich spam sites are generated dynamically through scripts that scrape the internet for content that is likely to be searched for by the general public. With a strategy designed to create revenue through volume, huge spam networks have been created (thousands of sites have been generated) by scraping or stealing content from legitimate websites.
3. Hidden Sitemaps and Links
One of the primary ways to garauntee that a site will be completely indexed (all pages will be crawled and included in the SERPS) is to include a sitemap on index pages or main pages that are sure to be crawled. A sitemap is essentially a list of links to all of the pages on the site, organized in an organized fashion. The inclusion of sitemaps is seen by many seo’s as essential, and is a step many dealer website have taken in the right direction with regard to designing sites that have a chance to rank well.
4. Heavy Reliance on Meta Tags
In the early days of the internet, much less sophisticated techniques were needed to deliver very high quality search results to users. As the net became a place where revenue was considered by many to be directly related to traffic volume, sites hungry for profit began to use the system in place to deliver more and more traffic. In the past, search engines used what are known as meta tags to determine what a site was about, and therefore what types of searches it should be shown for.
5. Poor Keyword Research
As was mentioned in my treatment of the use of meta tags, the majority of dealer websites fail to take into account the large variety of relevant keywords available and optimize only for the most highly competitive and least targeted terms. For sites like the one being optimized for my client, a concentration on the “long tail” is the most effective method in gaining quality traffic.
7. Little to no use of analytics
For any web marketer, the use of analytics (measures of website usage) is essential in creating highly effective sites that provide the best return on investment. In the past, analytics programs were beyond the scope of small businesses or beyond the ability of certain providers to offer their clients. Today, however, highly sophisticated analytics programs can be obtained at little to no cost, and many dealer site developers offer limited or even more extensive analytics as a value added service.
