The success or failure of your website is not determined by how good your web designer is or how skilled you are at website marketing – it is in fact determined well before your website is written. Only 5% of websites will ever appear on page 1 or page 2 of search engines for their desired keywords hence try to avoid these mistakes before you begin writing your website:

(For resources supporting this article please see my blog: Top 60 Web Design Mistakes of 2009)

1 – Lack of Keyword Research – This is a cardinal sin – how can you attempt to write a website without knowing what your visitor’s search for? Getting this wrong will mean that you will not rank well for the best terms, hence you will loose out on valuable organic traffic. There are many free keyword research tools at your disposal – use them!

2 – No Competitor Research – by not doing competitor research you won’t know how firmly rooted your page 1/2 competitors are – this is simple & can be done by using one of many free backlink checkers available on the net – as a general rule the more backlinks your competitor has the harder your job will be to compete for position. For example sites like moneysupermarket.com have 100s of thousands of backlinks – so that is a task you would want to avoid unless you can pay for an army of SEMs. It is also important to check how many pages your competitor’s websites have indexed as building a site with say 5 pages to your competitor’s hundreds would be equally pointless. Google will disclose this information – type site:yourdomain.com without the www. in the search bar.

3 – Nothing Special to Offer – doing exactly the same thing as your competitors is likely to make you blend into the abyss of failed or failing websites. Quality web design is all about being different – hence unless you spend some time planning to be better than your competitors then you are likely to fail. Think about better content, better visitor experience, easier navigation, special offers – anything that distances you away from the average – If you make the effort so will your visitor

4 – Lack of Quality Content – many people believe that just writing a website with a dozen or so pages is the recipe for website success – this simply is not true for most websites. If you have done your competitor research then you will know how many pages containing keyword relevant content your competitor’s website has. Lack of planning for high quality keyword rich content will result in poor visitor experience, lower ranking & poor conversion rates.

5 – Lack of Page Planning – failing to plan each of your pages correctly will cause you a problem with ‘on page factors’ – these affect your position in search engines. The following should contain your researched keywords: page names, directory names, titles, descriptions, headings, footers, menu text, link text & paragraphs. Your menus should be simple/ text selectable & your primary keyworded heading should be displayed high on page. Your contact details should always be found easily.

6 – No Plan for Marketing – most of us by now know that the myth of ‘write a website & the visitors will come’ is not true. The objective for most websites should be to aim for Page1 or Page2 of search engines. By doing your competitor research you will know how big a hill you have to climb un order to match/beat the competition. Being unrealistic with the time/budget for this task will make even the best website fail.

7 – Hosting Overseas – planning to host your website overseas is also a big mistake as many search engines use ‘Geo Targeting’ in their ranking algorithms – worse still – your website will almost certainly load slower than if hosted with a reputable host in your home country. So savings here are not worth making. Always check your hosts IP address to insure the servers really are based where the host claims they are – yes there are hosts that tell big fat lies.

8 – Poor use of Colours – you have approximately 3 seconds to make your first impression hence insure your colour scheme is perfect for your website & is unlikely to offend your visitors. Avoid luminous colour schemes & take care when designing websites geared for other countries as certain colours have major cultural significance. Avoid using any more than 3 colours in your scheme & insure these are web safe & matched well. Poor planning in this area is likely to make your website look amateur.

9 – Strange Fonts – consider that not all of us have perfect vision hence try not to make your visitors strain to read your content – use basic fonts such as Helvetica or Arial. Poor use of fonts is a certain way of your website becoming a victim of the back button. There are nor laws in place in a few countries that govern the use of text within websites – I haven’t heard of anyone being sued yet, but I’m sure someone will tell me otherwise.

10 – Selecting your URL & TLD – wherever possible choose a domain that contains your researched keywords then select the correct domain suffix (TLD) – use .co.uk for a UK company .com for e-commerce – you will have trouble indexing an Indian domain (eg .co.in) in the UK . Here are come common UK domain suffixes:

.com – ecommerce or commercial website (UK &/or International)

.co.uk – typical uk corporate website

.net – large network website – often used by hosting companies.

.biz – use for B2B business

.org.uk – organisation, group or charity

.info – informational site

.name – For identity purposes of an individual or organization

.ltd – requests only accepted from ltd companies