Here are 10 major reasons.

1. Your keywords are wrong.

One of the trickiest parts of creating websites isn’t technical – it’s keyword research. There’s little point to creating a slick, professional site if it’s built around keywords that have little traffic or are too broad to compete with established sites. There’s no magic formula for finding the right keyword phrases, but there are some great tools that help narrow them down and give you the best chance for success.

For example, if you are a veterinarian in New York, you would struggle to gain first-page placement for the phrase “vet New York”. But if you determined that the most popular breed of dog among your clients was a Maltese, or a certain medical procedure was common for a particular animal, using these in your keyword mix would make it easy to reach the first page.

Specific, popular phrases that reflect your specialties are essential to finding quality traffic.

2. Your website is SEO-unfriendly.

It’s remarkable how many $50,000 sites developed by web professionals have practically non-existent SEO features. By “SEO-unfriendly”, I’m referring to the overuse of Flash, too much Ajax, poor and inconsistent navigation, missing title and description metatags, missing ALT text, bad URLs, cloaking links in JavaScript and so forth. To do SEO well, it needs to be designed in from the beginning, and just because a site may look good in a browser window to a human doesn’t mean it will rank well in search engines.

If you have the opportunity to build from scratch, call the SEO experts at the same time as the design experts, since retrofitting the site later will be considerably more difficult.

3. There’s little or no content.

The days of having a website consisting of 5 pages, 500 words and a handful of pictures are over – sites like these are impossible in the SEO business, simply because there’s nothing there for a search engine (or visitor). Your site is much more than a marketing leaflet moved online, and you need to have regularly-refreshed content to make visitors feel there’s value.

“What could I possibly write about?” is a question I get asked all the time by customers, but it’s surprisingly easy to develop a program for building articles to attract visitors. While you can hire a web-copy professional easily, it’s generally better to develop in-house because you understand your business better than anyone else, and your voice is important in creating an authentic online presence.

If you’re stumped for ideas, think about what advice you give people at social events that has the most positive reaction – everyone has a point-of-view on their field of expertise that has value.  While a plumber may not think that plunging a garbage disposal is complicated or worth writing about, somebody Googling to plunge a blocked garbage disposal will find the content invaluable.

4. You have duplicate content.

Duplicate content is a real problem – both when it happens intentionally and unintentionally. Google’s concept of “duplicate content” doesn’t mean a word-for-word copy – it means “substantially the same”, so changing a few words doesn’t solve the problem. There are several areas that hurt websites, often without their knowledge:

• Several URLs resolve to the same page – such as http://www.mycompany.com, http://mycompany.com, http://mycompany.com/index.html and https://mycompany.com. Unwittingly, if you don’t define canonical names and redirects properly, your SEO suffers.
• You use product descriptions from manufacturers: cutting and pasting their descriptions causes the same problem, since other vendors do exactly the same thing.
• You have a review site for products based upon user-generated content (UGC) and your members cross-post to similar sites.
• Spam-bots steal your site’s page content and replicate it on another site with ads – there are tools to help locate these, and .htaccess methods to help block the problem (stopping this illegal copying once it’s happened is not easy, however).
• You use session IDs extensively, which create many multiple URLs pointing to the same content.

5. You may be over-optimizing your pages.

Personally, I believe that ‘keyword density’ is overdone as an SEO topic: the concept of repeating phrases to account for 3-5% of web-copy has been touted as a science and there’s very little to prove it (see how IMDB and Amazon and almost every major site all rank highly without doing this). Unfortunately, there’s also a belief that more is better, so webcopy develops into:

John Smith Sports Shoes and Clothing prides itself on supplying Sports Shoes and Clothing to the Midwest made exclusively by John Smith and his Sports Shoes and Clothing team. Do you need Sports Shoes and Clothing? If so, you’ll love our Sports Shoes and Clothing, made by……

6. Nobody links to you.

Inbound links – those where other people point to your site’s page – are the number one determinant in your site’s relevance and ranking. Inbound links are effectively votes for the quality of your site.  Designing a great site is only the start, and you need to find other sites that will refer you, such as:

• Trade associations, industry partners, vendors, customers and other firms you naturally deal with.
• Review sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, etc.)
• Bloggers and content sites (such as About.com).
• Government and educational sites, where possible, due to the disproportionate influence their

Link farms and other fake mechanisms should be avoided: these will hurt your SEO. Inbound links from quality sites share part of their PageRank (relevance) with you, whereas thousands of links from link farms detract from your score.

7. You’re not promoting your site.

Unlike in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they won’t come – at least not if you don’t tell them. A poorly-promoted site is like a store with no exterior signage, and you need to use every available channel to funnel visitors towards you:

• Use offline methods: is your site on your invoices, brochures, business cards, POS receipts and flyers?
• Are you using social media to direct customers who might be looking for your services?
• Are you looking at how your competitors get traffic and where they are prominent online?
• Are you using search engine marketing – Google, Yahoo, Bing, StumbleUpon, Facebook and affiliate programs?

8. You’re being unrealistic.

Just as we don’t all grow up to be astronauts, so too not all sites can be a runaway viral success. The truth is that a good portion of businesses lack the sexiness that allows their elevation to Digg superstardom. You can do everything ‘right’ and still find traffic is slow – it does happen, and that’s ok, as long as you still receive quality traffic. While the market for pet taxidermy may be very small, an well-optimized site will still attract visitors that are really interested in the subject, and will have a great conversion rate.

9. You’re a spammer.

But you’re not, are you? You might find that you are, because you could be using a cheap hosting solution with shared IPs that are abused by other customers, or you bought a really great domain name that came with historical baggage you weren’t aware of. There are plenty of ways that legitimate sites can be caught in the spam net, and it’s a good idea to check this out.

There are ways to get around these problems: find a quality host, change your domain name or alert the search engines to a change of ownership. But it’s surprising how many times this is a problem for sites that never engage in anything particularly questionable.

10. You paid $99 to get a guaranteed #1 Google listing.

The Internet is the Wild West for SEO – and everything else – and if it sounds too good to be true, I guarantee you it is. Whereas most often you will simply lose your $99, some companies engage in blackhat SEO, which means using unscrupulous methods to improve rankings. Many of these work wonders in the short term, resulting in a near-overnight domination of the engines, but you will always – always – get caught out in the end.

The problem with this is that once you get blacklisted for taking advantage of Google (which is obviously against their Terms of Service), Google can and will punish your site by denying a listing for months, years and maybe forever. Blackhat SEO is an extremely poor strategy given the growing sophistication of their algorithm.

The truth is that good SEO is a long, hard and complicated process that stops all your competitors from doing exactly the same thing – if you work hard at it, you can reach page one for your chosen topics. Ultimately, your success on the engines will reflect your success with visitors, and there aren’t any one-stop shortcuts.

James Beswick is the Founder of One Uproar and loves everything to do with SEO, SEM and SMO.

Blog post published by Social Media Today.

While Twitter is ridiculed by Twitnoobs and amateurs for mundane updates such as “I’m watching my cat… asleep”, the service has been taken to the next level by those who have embraced its realtime, geo-tagged, verbose and follower-driven world. Here are 10 clever ways to use Twitter that demonstrate its potential.

Use Twitter for Server Status and Job Reports

Twitter is, at heart, one big messaging system. If you have endless email and server jobs running that fire off success/failure emails, why not ditch the emails and get the cron jobs to Tweet out the result? You can create a Twitter ID with private tweets so only you and permitted followers can see the data. Personally, I’d rather receive Tweets than email for “this just happened” status updates.

Use Twitter for Inventory Alerts

Want to create some buzz among your customers when only 10 widgets are left, or there’s been a sudden price drop on a hot product? Rather than post updates to your website or print flyers, it’s simple to create a quick Tweet driven by your inventory system. There’s never been a more effective way to communicate time-sensitive price and inventory events to your customer base. And “once it’s gone, it’s gone”-style offers tend to generate a dedicated following.

Use Twitter to Find Your Most Effective Keywords

Getting traffic-rich keywords is the holy grail of SEO – it’s hard to do, but if you track your Tweets with tools such as su.pr, you can quickly start to see which topics interest your audience and drive your website’s content around those keywords. Su.pr provides metrics around which links are being followed (among many other things), and your most popular Tweets and keywords are probably not the ones you think they are.

Use Twitter Lists for SEO

If you use Twitter, you’re probably using lists by now, but maybe haven’t realized the inherent SEO benefits created by Google indexing:

• Make your lists public.
• Make lists selective (20-40 users).
• Embed keyword phrases in your list names (“Texas SEO advice”, not just “SEO”).
• Refer to your Twitter lists in blog posts and Tweet them (they have real URLs such as this SEO experts list).

Use Twitter to Monitor Your Competitors

Twitter for the most part is completely open and public. For many industries, it provides a rich source for understanding your competitors’ behavior, especially since you can mine their Tweet history. What time of month are they sending out specials? What kind of promotions are they pushing? What’s their retweet ratio (search RT @mycompetitor in Google)? While you’re there, take a look at their followers and followees, and follow the most active and appropriate users.

Use Twitter for Instant Crowdsourced Responses

On my private Twitter ID, I’ve managed to get immediate and useful advice on topics as diverse from the best proconsumer camcorders to the best breakfast tacos in Austin. This isn’t restricted to your follower list: a properly tagged question will be found by thousands of other users who watch hashtags such as #canon #taco and #keepaustinweird. The truly remarkable part is the speed in which people respond, and the quality of advice crammed into 140 characters.

Use Twitter to Find Local Customers

Want to know what people around you are saying about your products, industry or services? The Twitter advanced search allows you to search for pertinent keywords, phrases or hashtags that are happening around a certain area (such as what people think about Costco within 50 miles of San Francisco). There are no other tools – online or offline – that could provide this realtime local insight to provide leads and potential customers.

Use Twitter to Find Employees

Companies are getting deluged with applications whenever they post open jobs in the traditional venues, and social media is starting to become the new way to match employees and employees more successfully. Amidst sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter is rapidly becoming an effective way to reach out into your network to find designers, programmers, kitchen staff, gardeners, copywriters, and pretty much anything else.

Use Twitter to Water Your Plants

Interestingly, MakeZine wrote a piece about how to make your plants Tweet when they need water – while this might seem a little esoteric, it’s representative of what happens as practically everything gets an IP address and becomes connected to the network. Imagine if your home security system could tweet a break-in or your car tweeted a schedule service request: essentially, anything that can’t communicate that needs regular attention could tweet for your attention.

Use Twitter to Write a Book

If the average book is 80,000 words with around 5 letters per word, it could take nearly 3,000 Tweets to reach the end. In 2008, 5 of the top 10 bestsellers in Japan were cellphone novels, built by one or many writers 140 characters at a time. Now there are over 1,000,000 cellphone novels so the Tweetbook shouldn’t be far behind. James Beswick is the founder of One Uproar and the author of Getting Productive With Google Apps and The 50 Fastest Ways to Great SEO, neither of which are tweetable.

The numbers tell an interesting story about how we’re consuming information. I don’t believe that newspapers are going away—I think the model will change. While we are changing “how” we consume information, we still consume information. The NY Times now has a paid model for how you consume articles on their site. Our opinion: This will be how we see the news industry shifting–to a paid model.

Is it about the number of followers you have? Of course not! It’s not about the number of people that follow you—it’s about how you’re a part of the community.  Amber Naslund says this well in her new blog post, “Why Getting Followed Back Ain’t all That”. Our opinion: If you’re just lookin’ at the numbers you don’t get it!

Remember SEO is about freshness, quality and not quantity, content and linking. We like this summary about SEO. Our opinion: Content and linking—we can’t say that enough! These are the cornerstones of good SEO.

Tools/Apps
You must have heard about the new start-up Color, a photo sharing app that now has over $41 million in funding. I’ve had at least 2-3 conversations about it this week.

We love this WP widget, Anticipate—if you have major maintenance going on this is the tool to use. Thanks Blogging OT for another great post!

Events
There are a few interesting events coming up in San Francisco.  The Web 2.0 Expo kicks off next week. Liz Gannes will be hosting a few sessions. iStrategy has an interesting digital conference that starts on April 5^th. Don’t forget to check our events calendar we update every week.

Publishing new book on how to use Google Apps for your business – Google Apps Express our new book is in the proofing stage and will be out on Amazon in the next week. We’ll tell you how to harness the power of Google Apps for your business, no matter how small or big you are.

SXSW Interactive 2011 – We’ll be in Austin, Texas this year for SXSW Interactive! Can’t wait to connect with everyone and see what’s new in the interactive/digital space. We’ll be blogging live about events and workshops we’re attending, our insights as well as new programs and vendor solutions we find.

Get your weekend reading on!
Articles and great sites we’ve found this week.

Who’s Blogging About What is a comprehensive  marketing source that pulls together the “best” of the “best” in all things important in the digital marketing world.

Are you blogging overtime? Check out this blog for insightful tips on how to make the most of your blog.

I like the posts in the Argyle Social Marketing blog—perfect in length and provides nice tips.

This is a post from the archives in The Social CMO—love the content here.  Always insightful and easy to digest.  A good reminder on how to get your social content to rise to the top.

TED is always a winner: Johanna Blakely talks about social media and the end of a gender.

SEO specialist James Beswick has published “Ranking Number One: 50 Essential SEO Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results” with San Francisco web consultants One Uproar.

This new book provides up-to-date information for online marketers including emphasis on social media, creating content and providing local relevance for visitors.

“Ranking Number One: 50 Essential SEO Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results” is now available at Amazon.com, and has a companion website at http://ranking-number1.com.

Like many of you I’ve been told to do more with less. Whether you’re a marketer or business owner we have smaller budgets and need to gain more traction. The landscape of how to communicate your business to the public has changed and shifted so much in the last five years. I find myself reading, tweeting, and learning. I love it. There is an amazing opportunity now to ramp up your companies’ presence online for very little spend. So, I thought I would share my results and what has been working for me lately.

• Get your website up to snuff. Whether you use Drupal or WordPress, do something. The platform doesn’t really matter. Get a good designer to help you make a splash but develop your site on a platform in which YOU can make edits, upload new images, change copy when you need to. You’ll look like a superstar—it will take minutes out of your day to upload that latest press release, news coverage, or new image. Plus you’re saving your company money by executing these small changes yourself. For me WordPress is what I use for my art website and Drupal is my company’s platform. If implemented correctly both platforms are easy to maintain and update.
• Advertising – If you want to skip print media for now try Google AdWords. It’s inexpensive but you will need to check and fine tune your key words. It will take some time to find the right ad content for your business so start out slow with a small spend per day.
  • SEO – I am no SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert but I’ve done the following to help my companies’ ranking and also employed the same techniques for other businesses:
    • Google Map Profile – It’s free—just go to Google and create a Gmail account for your business and a map profile. This helps index your site and elevate organic searches for your business.
    • Google Analytics – Also free—set it up on Google by copying the code they give you onto your website. You really be able to see who is visiting your site, where they are coming from, what pages they are visiting—the reporting is very detailed and you can cut and paste this onto any report for presentations.
    • Web copy – Writing the actual copy for your website does take a lot of time. Key words and repetition within the site is what Google and other search engines look for. Spend time thinking about what key words are revelent to your business and then see how you can weave these into your overall copy.
    • Website updates – It’s important that you update your website as often as possible. Whether you’re posting a news coverage, sending out a new update on Twitter, LinkedIn or posting to your blog this tells Google that your website is relevant and an active business.
    • Social Media. We’ve all been hearing about it. It’s not free and takes up a lot of human capital. Start out small and slowly. For me I’m a one person show so I symphathize with many of you who are operating with limited staff. I started by creating our Linkedin profile initially and just recently started Twitter. Think about social media as platforms that work together. Twitter is your platform to send links to the world and short reminders. Blogs are where you should be posting longer richer content.

• Create your company’s Linkedin profile. It does matter—whether you’re an individual business owner or a large company—this is the online hub to “record” yourself to the world. If you’re an individual business owner—this is your online resume and fact sheet. It’s really the same for any size company. If you work for a larger organization rally employees to create profiles on Linkedin. Get HR to post that next job opening. This one is easy for you to maintain—once your profile is created you’re just editing and maintaining. Linkedin is a very standard profile all companies should have.

• Create a Twitter profile. Keep it simple. Don’t overwhelm yourself. For me it’s literally just me supporting Twitter so I sent out a tweet once a week. I also “build” content in the background and try to send out more content when I can. Take advantage of these platforms—they’re free and just require your time. This is another platform that you can get your subject matter experts within the company involved. Collaborate with your business experts and sales to create short, content subjects that your clients care about. It’s not about how great your company is. Put yourself in the seat of the customer—what do they want to know? What criteria or search is involved in reaching your company, your product, or your service? What’s your view on the your industry? This type of content will create traction and get those followers!

• Blogs. Do you need to post to your blog daily? If you can but try starting by posting once a week. Remember this is your platform to post longer content—at least 300 words. Test out different types of content you’ll find what will work for your industry. Keep it fun—post something that isn’t too time intensive on your part every now and then.

• Video. Many of us don’t have the budget to hire a professional video expert. Buy a video camera and tripod and start recording—for my company’s website it’s about our business process and value proposition so maybe we’ll record projects, brown bag seminars, public speaking events and even a quarterly “tv” spot to our customers–you get the idea. Post to YouTube and get it on your website.

Here are some great companies and sites to visit for services:

• 415 Systems – http://www.415systems.com – WordPress web design, SEO and SEM services
• Hubspot – http://hubspot.com – Online Marketing tools helping you to find customers
• Af83inc. – http://af83inc.com/ – Drupal web design, SEO and SEM services
• Google Tools – http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/services/var_1.html

See Wendy’s Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/wenbryant.