Image via Flickr, by Aaron Jacobs, under CC

Kat recently wrote a post on Lame-Ass Syndrome (LAS) in top South African media and communications company websites. 

Briefly, LAS is a Quirk-coined term which refers to bad redirects and canonicalisation errors – without this technical backbone, your site will not be reachable without the exact address (for instance, without the www) – and bad redirects can result in search engines perceiving your content as duplicated, which is not good.

Read the original post here. In the hopes of giving these and other companies a few pointers on what to look out for when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation and bringing their sites up to the 2.0 standard, here’s a run down of a few SEO pitfalls.  

Buying Links and Pay-For-Inclusions

Many companies insist on buying links. Perhaps they think that seeing as they’re paying for SEO services they may as well pay a bit more for some quality links.  

First off, paid links are hardly ever quality links, and most search engines easily identify paid links and frown upon them.  

Inconsistency in Keywords

Although you won’t be penalised if the key phrase in page title and header tags aren’t identical, it’s not going to count in your favour either – especially when using highly competitive terms. Plurals and slight variations are sometimes necessary, but a common mistake is to have variations scattered across the page.

Also, be sure to use the correct syntax. For example, separate keywords with hyphens in URLs. This will spell it out for the search engine spiders, and also make consistency in keywords easier.

Non-‘Spiderable’ Content

A great looking site is one thing, but using elements such as copy in images instead of actual text can be a site’s downfall. A website made entirely out of Flash is probably going to be quite visually appealing, but at this stage in the SEO game, it can be ineffective.

Bad Internal Linking structure

Having a good interlinking structure is as important as a keyword strategy. If you’re unsure of the quality of your structure, draw or map out your linking structure as you would a family tree. You’ll soon see which pages don’t receive enough internal support.

Keyword Stuffing

In the Meta data and copy itself, keyword stuffing turns search engines off just as quickly as it would a potential customer. Nobody likes content that comes across as generated rather than sculpted.

Finding a good balance between keyword density and saturation is vital in creating valuable content.

Repetition and Duplication

Like keyword stuffing, repetition of content or keywords across multiple pages can do more damage than good. Uniqueness in key phrases and Meta data is as important as fresh content.

Not Optimising Images

Images give you another opportunity to point out relevancies to search engine spiders. Although it is a standard SEO practice, it is often overlooked and an opportunity many don’t utilise.

Be sure to use the following wisely: 

• Image filenames.

• Image Alt text.

• Relevant text around the image and captions.

• Properties of the image itself.

Your brand logo on your website masthead, for instance, can be optimised with your brand name and other relevant text to fit the page. This will increase the overall integrity of your optimisation, plus the added benefits of image search rankings.