A friend of mine is engaged, and I am to be one of her bridesmaids. As a four-time bridesmaid, I’ve unfortunately been to more wedding blogs and bridal shop websites than a sane human should. Some are fantastic, doing everything SEOs recommend: engaging and well-written content, a solid back link profile, good information architecture, attractive designs and clean code. And as with any industry, a large number are poorly designed and built, and even more poorly optimized.

Recently, my friend and I were going wedding dress shopping, and she sent me to the website of the bridal store she’d chosen. I was slightly horrified.

I’d like to say this was one of the worst wedding sites I’ve seen, but the errors they were making are quite common to sites across sites in all niches. From keyword stuffed content pages, to duplicate content, and spammy back links, this shop was doing nearly everything SEOs consider to be wrong.

Whether this hurts organic traffic, of course, depends on the niche. The wedding industry is pretty cut-throat, and unfortunately the search engines have proven that techniques like this often do still work. In fact, the bridal store ranks #2 for [bridal store mississauga], likely one of their most coveted keywords. They are outranked only by a shop in Mississauga actually named The Bridal Store. Not bad, right?

But how does a badly optimized website reflect on potential customers?

I asked my friend what her impressions were prior to visiting the store. She admitted, “yeah, the website sucks.” But she actually hadn’t chosen the store because of, or in spite of, the website, but because a friend had recommended it. Had she found the site via a search, she might not have been so eager to dress shop there. I know I was a little reluctant that the store would be any good.

First impressions are important, and a website is often the first encounter potential customers have with a brand. It can be as important as the store front for brick-and-mortar businesses, so why wouldn’t you want to put your best foot forward? Perhaps a personal recommendation can overcome the impact of the website, but what if the potential customer is discovering you for the first time via your site?

One of my favorite tools of all time is one I often find marketers have never heard of. A colleague told me just last week they hadn’t heard of it. Seriously? I can’t figure out how they managed to miss it. This single tool can help you get the ball rolling for all of your social media, brand management and online reputation management campaigns, and assist you with content creation and link building. It alone has saved me countless hours of mind numbing work  and possible carpal tunnel.

It is, of course, Knowem (like “know ‘em”).

In essence, Knowem signs up for all your social media profiles for you. Like, 300 of them. Run an agency and frequently sign up social media accounts for clients? Save your interns from carpal tunnel and sign up for one of their plans. If you work for a large organization with many brands to manage, again save your interns the pain and sign up for a plan.

Even as a smaller business, on a tighter marketing budget, you can still make use of Knowem without paying a cent, if you can spend a bit of time with it.

Check Your Name

First of all, the most obvious use is that you can check your username or brand name for free. Knowem displays which social sites have that name available, and links off to them so you can go sign up manually.

You can do this without even registering, but if you sign up for a free account you can keep track of which sites you’ve signed up for without doing the manual searching. This is particularly helpful as new sites get added.

Cover Your *ss

If your name is common or trademarked, you likely want to control it across the entire web. While Knowem doesn’t quite include every social network, it comes pretty close, and gets you everything from the most popular sites like Twitter and Facebook, to obscure ones like Scoopeo.

And you can check if all the versions of your domain have been registered, including the random .aero TLD.

Clearly I need to purchase some domains

Discovery

Best of all, though, is that you can find some really unique, niche social networks that you never would have known existed otherwise. These sites can end up becoming part of your social media or content strategy.

Take Scoopeo, for example, which bills itself as a French social bookmarking site. If you’re doing international SEO, you might want to check into a site like this. Blog about fitness? Check Knowem’s Health tab for sites to share your content on. Looking for new content ideas? Browse through the sites listed and see what’s popular. There are as many ideas as there are sites.

On the whole, Knowem is one of those tools that internet marketers must have in their toolbox, regardless of whether you specialize in social media or search engine optimization, and no matter your budget.

There are plenty of people who claim that SEO is a science. They say nearly every problem can be solved with a repeatable solution and that high page ranking is more of a function of long hours than smart work. They are wrong.

Proper SEO is more of an art than a science. Sure, there are plenty of repeatable steps the best guys practice in order to up your website’s visibility, but to think there’s any kind of one-size-fits-all approach will get you in a situation just like JCPenney.

Here are a few of our most-seen SEO mistakes that far too many people make.

1. Serving broken pages with a 200 response code

So you moved content, deleted a page or just didn’t get around to finishing a page you started. Do you leave it there? Of course not, unless you’re Greyhound. Greyhound.com/locations should be redirecting to the new Greyhound locations page, but apparently whomever constructed their site doesn’t seem to think so.

Seems /locations would be the ideal place to find locations of Greyhound terminals on their site.

2. You links look unnatural

Please stop acquiring links to your site from completely unrelated sites. It’s not natural for a mommy blogger to link to a penis enlargement site, no matter how lonely she is. Your 5 year old site that had 20 links to it last week should not have 20,000 links to it this week unless you found a cure for cancer or something. Is every link to your site the same keyword rich phrase? If so, stop doing that. Think before you link. Look at what is typical within your niche and try to look natural.

3. Your page titles suck

This is nearly as bad as leaving “admin” as the author of every WordPress post. Wait, no, that’s not right. Crappy page titles get your site little Google love and will turn off anyone reading. Think short and descriptive instead of default.

You don't want your site to look like this in the SERPs

4. Your site ranks for [insert pills porn or casino term here] and shouldn’t

I’m fairly sure the University of Georgia and the University of California at Santa Barbara don’t post many articles relating to buy Viagra, but they rank pretty well for it. Most of the time, this is a result of a site being hacked.

It's not surprising that engineers need a little Viagra

5. Your site is built completely in Flash

Flash is good for plenty of things, e.g. cool animations that add value, video walk-throughs and time-wasting games. It is NOT good to build an entire site completely in Flash, as the search engines will likely not pick up much, if any of it in their index. Mobile users are usually completely out of luck, as even non-iOS devices haven’t had great success in making Flash truly mobile worthy. Photographers seem to be continuous offenders of this rule and someone needs to stop them from doing it.

6. Your site doesn’t rank in the top 100 for at least a few main keywords

Unless you have zero interest in others finding your work, your site should rank in the top 100 for at least a few of your main keywords, provided you’re not writing about hugely popular subjects like anything related to a DUI. You may not experience an avalanche of traffic at position 83, but at least you know you’re making progress. Having your entire site outside the top 100 means you’re not trying hard enough or you’ve been penalized.

7. You get traffic, but no one buys

Far too many sites are excellent at attracting readers and very poor at attracting customers. This could be because your targeted keywords are poorly thought out, your call to action is terrible or you’re giving everything away. A bit of target market research is essential to figuring out what search terms people use when looking to buy. Figure out what converts the best and focus on that. Don’t just try to saturate every possible keyword in your niche. If you are selling something, don’t try to rank for terms that have “free” in them.

SEO is part art, part science and part knowing your audience. Which part could you improve on?

We’re excited to announce a pretty big new feature which will be live next week. We’ve been working with a few different API’s to bring in backlink data about any website. There aren’t that many sources for this information, and numbers from these sources can vary widely, which is why we decided to give you all of them, and let you choose which metric to look at. We’ve successfully incorporated data from Yahoo!, SEOmoz and MajesticSEO. We’re also pulling, in real-time, the latest blogs linking to any site. Here’s a preview of what you’ll see very soon.

We’ve used the Top Rank Blog as an example, and you’ll see from these numbers, they’ve done an impressive job of developing link worthy content. How does your blog compare? Next week you’ll be able to find out.

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A friend of mine, Travis Campbell, did a great review of AuthorityLabs on his marketing strategy blog. This is an example of how someone used AuthorityLabs to make sure their site is positioned where it should be during drastic changes. Travis had to merge two sites into one, and needed to easily ensure he retained his rankings. AuthorityLabs allowed him to get daily feedback on how changes he made to his site affected search engine visibility. He invested heavily in SEO and AuthorityLabs helped him protect that investment.