It’s tough calling people out on their missteps – the response is often less than grateful.

I like your post – total agreement. Your site design isn’t half bad either. Nice work.

Your point one comes at a great time actually, I’ve just written an article called Writing your copy with rankings in mind? You’re doing it wrong. which is all about why you shouldn’t write your copy with things like keyword density in mind…

I’ve subscribed to your feed too, just going through all of your old articles whilst I have what seems to be the worst headache ever. Hopefully it should chill me out a bit (is that sad?).

@goodnewscowboy Thanks. I agree there is some similarity between points 2 & 10, but I was trying to focus #2 on navigation/interactive elements and #10 on general content/infographics.

@IgniteMedia It sounds like you may be more referring to PPC traffic – with PPC you almost always want to isolate your landing pages (and prevent them from being indexed organically) – mainly to prevent the convolution of your data. Still, your question about what happens when the user navigates to another page and can’t get back is a good one – if the user breaks out of the conversion path it can throw their experience. There’s no easy answer, really – but asking the question is the first step towards a plausible solution.

There’s also pressure on SEOs to work within a given set of deliverables and justify their services/sales. It’s an unfortunate reality of the business world that service providers move over to win-lose thinking if their short-term revenue is at stake.

This is the problem I have with keyword specific landing pages and usability. I think making sure the landing page relates to the ad and the phrase they typed in is good, but from a usability standpoint what happens if that person clicks to another page and can’t get back to the landing page? I mean most landing pages aren’t linked from other pages on the site because they are meant specifically for CPC, or a targeted marketing campaign.

Just a frustration I have. Good post though, not sure I agree it’s only the Rookie’s that make these mistakes as Jordon mentions. I think sometimes even the well intentioned forget to look up from their “work” to see how it looks as a whole.

Also loved the “squeezed off a round into your own foot” and hit on both cylinders” analogies.