Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday. I’m a sucker for classic monster movies. In the spirit of the season, here is my list of top scariest SEO practices (or lack of), as told by my favorite movie monsters.

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Frankenstein’s SEO – This content creation has a pretty broad range. Dr. Frankenstein might be patching old content together to feign new content, or he might be copying content in several places to give the impression of having more information than there actually is. Either way, the search engine spiders know it, and they like it as much as any village mob. You’ll find that your content doesn’t index well, and search engines won’t mark your pages as relevant. Your content should always be fresh and original, and stay away from anyone called Abby Normal (thank you, Young Frankenstein)!

The Content Mummy – “Collect your bones, gather your limbs, shake the earth from your flesh!” brought to you by the Pyramid of Unas and objectively awesome Brendan Fraser film, The Mummy. The Content Mummy arises from years of neglected content. If your content is more than a year old, it’s reaching the end of its life. If you haven’t updated your content in more than 3 years, get ready for a sandstorm, because ancient content might curse your web traffic!

The Metadata Zombie – It takes an immense effort to create relevant and consumer friendly content. Sometimes you just don’t have time to shamble through metadata and H-tags. What this creates is zombie webpages. Sure, taking care of one of these problem pages is no big deal, but if you haven’t been maintaining your SEO strategy from the beginning, you might find yourself overwhelmed by the zombie herd – and your lack of site traffic.

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The Werewolf Transformation Pages – Aaaaaooooo! The metadata told the search engines one thing, but the content revealed a totally different subject. No one likes to search for a subject and find themselves on a website that has nothing to do with their question. Make sure that your metadata is keyword rich, unique, and relevant to each page on your website.

The Keyword Vampire –The SEO Vampire has majorly overloaded web content with keywords to manipulate search engines into ranking their pages higher. This gives the language and flow of the content a strange, unnatural quality that is unpleasant for the reader. Additionally, this is noticeable to search engine spiders, which can penalize pages with falsely keyword-dense content. Remember, if your strategy is to come up with great content for your user base, then it will also work for search engine spiders.

The Ghost of Broken Tech – The content is there, but it has technical difficulties that make it… insubstantial. If you lack the necessary technical aspects of your website, your website could be a ghost town indeed. Check that your sitemap is available and up to date. Fix any broken links, put your robots.txt file in place, and make sure your Google Analytics code is in place so you can monitor your site’s progress.

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The Skeleton Site – The skeleton site has all of the necessary structure, but it lacks the creative, thorough content required to show your differentiating factors as an organization. You may address all of your services, but until you build out what makes your organization unique, your site is going to be pretty bare bones. Make sure that you discuss how your organization addresses the topic of each webpage.

The Content Slasher – The Slasher tries too hard to compartmentalize their content, making it difficult for the user to find what they’re looking for. They were trying to make sure they only presented one idea per page, but they went overboard, creating a navigational nightmare. If a user has to click through three or four pages to find out what doctors at your facility treat their condition, your content may have been hacked up a bit too small.

Don’t let these SEO monsters make a mess of your healthcare website!

AVID Design offers full-scale written and visual communication services for hospitals and healthcare systems, including Web design, SEO and PPC content development and assessment, online video and rich media, analytics and measurement, content management systems and more.

Dani Robinson Holland | Web Content Specialist/Writer/Editor | AVID Design

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Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Best Practices, SEO Mistakes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2012 at 9:46 am and is filed under AVID Design, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.