Avoid 7 Most Common Mistakes in SEO
There are seven common mistakes that people tend to make when beginning to optimize their sites for search engines. Every search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is a double-edged sword. One wrong calculation here and one there and you can end up billions of light-years away from your destination. In this post I’m going to suggest 7 SEO mistakes that you should definitely avoid.
- Lack and Incorrect Targeted Keywords and Phrases
Lack of targeted keywords and phrases can make or harm your site SEO. When a searcher goes to a search engine or directory and types in a keyword or keyword phrase but unable to find your site in search engine because you don’t have these particular keywords and phrases on your site. Almost every SEO effort revolves around the chosen keywords and lots of money and time were spent on obtaining a high ranking for the keywords. All the effort will be wasted if you focus on the wrong keywords. Carefully study targeted keywords and key phrases your niche market and optimize accordingly. Let your keywords flow naturally with the content. They shouldn’t appear more than once in a paragraph.
- Poor Content
Website content is important sources for both search engine spiders and search engine or directory users. Well-written content is what search engine spiders feed on, and content is the key to high rankings. Insufficient content or no content means no links and cause no traffic. Rich content to encourage visitor to link to your content and in the long run will increase incoming links over the time. However, content getting buried over time. A large number of sites that create huge amounts of content use automated publishing systems that buries stuff over time. This will cause duplicate content and it’s unbelievable how much duplicate content that some sites created. The duplicate content is a common killer and become a big factor in poor page rank management. The search engines will never find out what your site represent and what product or service you intend to sell if it doesn’t have enough content.
- Black Hat SEO Techniques
Black Hat web site optimization includes techniques that are unethical and frowned upon by search engine spiders. These techniques include keyword stuffing, doorway pages, hidden text, and more. These practices actually do raise your site ranking. However, search engine spiders have become very aware of Black Hat SEO techniques and can spot them pretty easily. Read more about 12 things to avoid in SEO.
- Apply Improper Meta Tags
Meta tags include title tags, keyword tags, and description tags. Make sure to apply correct tags relevant to the post in every page of your site, and target them for each individual page. Do not use same meta description (and keywords) on every page because these elements considered as duplicate content and will be filtered checks by the search engines. The meta description is important because it often gets used as the description that the search engine uses for your web page, so make sure it describes the unique information to be found on webpage.
- Poor Designed Site
Poor site design includes lack of proper navigation, poorly designed frames and large load-intensive graphics. Search engine spiders can actually be blocked from crawling sites that are not well-designed. Especially flash site that looks pretty but not a great experience for a crawler. This does not mean you cannot have all flash sites. This is to make sure you offer text link navigation options and use a technique like alternative text for image and Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (SIFR) for movie.
- Poor Titles and Headers
Titles are the first thing that search engine spiders see when they look at your website. They are a great way to tell a search engine what your page is all about. Each page on your site should have a different title optimizing for that particular page. The relevant title should contain targeted keywords or key phrase in order to get the proper ranking in search engines. Keyword tools tell you what language people use when referring to your products and services. Even in a world without web sites, this is something you would want to know. Then you need to make sure you have pages and content that addresses the major topic areas that relate to your business.
- Poor Linking
Links from your own websites are your greatest assets because you can control the outcome. Titles, content, and anchor text should match the keywords on the page you are linking to when linking to your own pages. A link is like a vote in search engine’s eye. If you “vote” for sites that are banned, aren’t related, or are full of spam are considered not healthy in SEO. In fact, it may get you penalized. It’s pretty easy to identify one of these pages. This shouldn’t be a problem for most as there would be no reason for the average person to link to crappy pages, but if you are a part of a reciprocal linking program, this will immediately become relevant but too much reciprocals link is not encourage by search engines.
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February 20th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
[...] SiteMost wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThere are seven common mistakes that people tend to make when beginning to optimize their sites for search engines. Every search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is a double-edged sword. One wrong… [[ This is a content summary only. … [...]