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 – No Keyword Research – Attempting to write a website without keyword research is effectively going blind. Good keyword research usually reveals many surprises and potential niche keywords that could be used to drive traffic. Poor use of keywords is the number 1 reason for website failure and it’s totally avoidable through the use of keyword research tools – many of which are free to use.

2 – Lack of Competitor Research – without competitor research you won’t know whether your page 1 competitors have 30 or 30,000 backlinks, and you won’t know if their websites have 3 or 300 pages. The term ‘mortgage’ has 189 million pages listed in Google – moneysupermarket.com who are usually number 1 has 306,000 backlinks – hence it would be unrealistic for anyone other than a team of professional SEMs to compete. Simple research takes minutes and could save months of wasted effort and wasted cash.

3 – Same as the Next Guy – By making your website the same as everyone else you are not telling your visitor what’s different, hence you are setting your website for failure. Plan to be different and insure you convey your differences quickly – think about improving your: content, visitor experience, site navigation & any special offers you might have when planning your website – making this effort in the planning stage really pays dividend later

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 – No Page Planning – lack of page planning will inevitably result in lower search engine ranking. Insure that you use well researched keywords in: page names, directory names, titles, descriptions, headings, footers, menu text, link text & your paragraphs. Your menus should be easy to follow and your important headings should be high up the page. Keep your page layouts consistent and if you are writing a large website use scripting language such as ASP or PHP. Wherever possible build CMS so pages can be added or removed 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 – Cheap Hosting Overseas – unless your site is geared more to international traffic rather than local or national then hosting overseas is a bad idea. Cheap overseas hosting will lead to longer load times & will affect your ranking in search engines. Plan to host your website in your home country – use a fast well recommended hosting service with 24/7 support – be sure to check the hosts IP address to insure the servers really are based where the host claims they are. Many search engines today use Geo Targeting in some manner.

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 – corporate website

.net – larger network website – typically used by web hosts

.biz – almost purely for business-to-business sites

.org.uk – group, charity or organisation

.info – informational site .name – usually used for individuals

.name – for an individual or group

.ltd – requests only accepted from ltd companies