By Richard Mark

YNOT – Statistics indicate 74 percent of consumers and 81 percent of businesses investigate products online before they buy. Search engines are the first place they start looking. Business owners and managers have a moral obligation to their companies to ensure their websites place well in search engine results.

Optimizing your website to perform well in the search engines can yield a wide range of benefits. A properly optimized website will:

• Attract relevant, high-quality traffic that’s easier to convert into customers.
• Generate leads or sales for your company.
• Promote your company and increase brand awareness 24/7 for relatively low cost.

I could go on about the benefits, but you get the point. Simply put, search engine marketing is essential for any company that wants to be successful online. But with so much conflicting information out there about how to optimize your website for maximum performance, you could be making costly mistakes without realizing it. Here are the five most common search engine marketing mistakes to avoid.
1. Choosing the wrong keywords. The keywords you choose are the backbone of your search engine marketing campaign. If you choose the right keywords, you’ll attract quality traffic that consists of eager customers looking to buy your products and services. With the wrong keywords, you’ll get low-grade traffic that just doesn’t convert. Make sure your keywords are well researched and relevant to the products and services you offer.

2. Insufficient content. There is a direct correlation between the amount of text in your website and the number of keywords your website can target. Too often, companies try to target five or six keywords for a page with only two or three paragraphs of text. If the keywords are competitive (and if they’re not, why are you targeting them?), the tactic won’t work. The soft rule is that you need one page of text (300-500 words) to support each major keyword phrase you want to target. The most competitive terms can require even more copy per keyword.

3. Writing only for visitors or only for search engines. SEO copywriting involves targeting specific keywords in your website copy so the copy will turn up in the search results when people search the keyword. Unfortunately, typical copywriters write only to the visitor and ignore good SEO techniques. Conversely, too many SEO copywriters get carried away with keyword targeting, and they overlook how humans read and interact with the content. The best effort lies somewhere in the middle: a balance of both interesting and effective copy for the visitor and proper content optimization for the engines. Great SEO copywriting both pleases the search engines and converts human visitors into customers.

4. Failure to add fresh content on a regular basis. Search engines love new, fresh content on your website. Content turnover demonstrates that a business is still kicking and doing well, separating the website from those belonging to spammers and phishers. Adding a blog is an easy way to provide fresh content on a regular basis.

5. Improper naming of page URLs. An SEO-friendly URL structure is essential for ranking well in regards to a page’s targeted keyword. For example, suppose a page on your website sells Gibson electric guitars. The URL should look something like this: MyWebsite.com/gibson-electric-guitars.html. It should not look like this: MyWebsite.com/123adt79.html. Incorporate the main keywords into your URLs for a more search engine-friendly website.

Take a moment to grade your website. Look at it through the eyes of a potential customer. Would you buy from this website if you were a customer? Would you rank it highly if you were a search engine algorithm? If not, go back to the drawing board and try again.

If you can avoid making these mistakes, you’ll get much more out of your search engine marketing efforts.

This article originally appeared at MainstreamWebmasters.com. It was revised and reprinted with permission.