10 Search Engine Optimization mistakes to avoid at all costs!

1. Don’t write your content just for Search Engines

Make your pages primarily for your visitors; make the content useful, scannable and interesting for the visitor. Don’t hide content or present different content for search engines and visitors. Tricks like keyword stuffing and littering your content aren’t a natural way of writing.

The ultimate goal for SEO is to generate targeted traffic and convert visitors into “customers” so focus on those visitors.

2. Don’t use the same Title for every page

The Title should be unique to every page and should describe the page. When someone is searching for a term and your Website comes up the title appears in the search results. If the title doesn’t explain the page correctly you could lose that click or the person may leave your Website as the page’s content does not tie up with the title.

(On a technical point: A search engine survey completed in 2009 by SEOMoz’s panel of 72 SEO experts found that Keyword usage in the Title were of high importance 63% to 66%)

3. Don’t leave your Website for months and hope that it magically starts to rank

Your Website is a form of marketing and you cannot sit back and relax with any type of marketing. You must monitor the progress and tweak things as you need. You also need to keep your Website fresh with new content. Why would people come back if your content hasn’t changed in months? How would it look if you only had an one article from 6 months ago? How embarrassing! Think of the Websites that you return to regularly and why do you come back?

4. Don’t hide useful content in images

Search Engines cannot read words contained in an image so don’t hide your valuable keywords in an image (if you can avoid it). Another point; some people may browse your site with images off – how would they read the content contained in the image? (Of course there are Alt tags to describe an image but this doesn’t have as much weight as good old text.)

5. Don’t forget the Meta Description

Don’t forget to add your Meta Description, it should also be unique to each page and describe what the page is about. This can be longer than the title so more information can be added. The Description tag most often appears in search results under the Title.

6. Don’t leave out Analytics

With the progression and the growth of the Web it is imperative to be able to track your online presence. There are plenty of analytics tools out there with Google Analytics being the most popular free option. Google’s version works well when you are running other Google services such as Google AdWords and Google Website Optimizer.

Using Analytics gives you a look behind the scenes to find out what people are doing on your site, how did they find you, how long did they spend on your site, and you can set goals to track conversions such as form submissions. Perfect to track your ROI!

7. Don’t ever make a Splash page

The dreaded splash page serves little purpose for Websites these days. The splash page doesn’t offer the search engine, nor the visitor any useful information about the Website. There is often no real content on the page for the search engine to crawl and then you may not be ranked for the keywords you want, you could end up with your search result including irrelevant text like “Click here to enter”. And the Search Engine may not be able to access the rest of your Website, which is detrimental to SEO. (They are also bad on a usability point of view – consider those with a slower connection, they would have to wait in order to get into your Website.)

8. Don’t associate your Website with Link Farms

Don’t ever get involved with Link Farms! Link Farms are sites that are there purely to link to other sites. Link popularity is about building quality links, not quantity. Link Farms promote spam and don’t increase your popularity – they could get your site penalized. Google considers links as votes for your Website so each link should be relevant and trustworthy.

9. Don’t believe in a Number 1 guaranteed spot from someone

No ethical SEO should guarantee number 1 placements. No one has a direct line to Google to ask them to add the site as number 1. Often if they can offer this guarantee they may employ underhanded tactics by using cloaking, hidden text, doorway pages and the like. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process so don’t believe them!

10. Don’t overload your Website with lots of images and Flash

2 reasons: Speed and People’s attention span.

Google has recently added page loading speed into their criteria for ranking pages so as a rule don’t add too many images and flash and make use of techniques to speed up loading times.

People also have a short attention span; if your site takes too long to load they may decide to leave your Website. Also consider those that choose to disable Flash and images to speed up their viewing, how will the site look with those disabled?

So those are just a few of the common mistakes that come to my mind on SEO, please feel free to post your own suggestions of what NOT to do.

Related Posts

• Search Engine Optimization, where & how to start?
• My favourite Search Engine Optimisation resource is SEOMoz!
• Quick tips for SEO on-page optimization

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