Search Engine Optimization has become a necessity for every website owner. But what differs the professional’s from the rookie’s are the mistakes. Considering the magnitude of SEO being so very vast, probable mistakes are common and plenty. Many of them can bring your SEO campaign to a grinding halt and cut out the probability of millions of people using search engines from visiting your site.
Targeting Wrong Keywords
=> Selecting a keyword is considered the most initial phase of SEO, infact a domain name is bought considering the keywords to be targeted many a times. Many webmasters even experienced Search engine optimizers tend to make this mistake unknowingly. There are many factors to be considered while selecting keywords, including searches per month, the nature of people using such searches and what kind of information they expect, the level of competition,etc. Selecting keywords which match your domain name is a ++ point.
Lack Of Keywords In The Content
=> You may have read at many places that Off-page SEO is of a much greater value than On-Page SEO, true, but without that little necessary on-page SEO, the hundreds and thousands of links have a much lesser value as you are not able to prove to search engines that your content matches the niche of the anchor text being used in the backlinks, hence having a fairly small but relevant keyword density is a must.
Use OF Too Much Javascript
=> We all know that search engines are not smart enough yet to understand Javascript scripts. Use of a sitemap is a necessity when you are going to use javascript in menu’s. Another alternative is adding your links in a ‘noscript’ tag makes them crawlable and hence indexible.
Use OF Only Images
=> Search Engines can’t see what an image is, if your site has ‘only’ and i mean just images, a search engine will see the site as blank with no data. Image optimizaton is a must, having all your content added into images may make the site look more creative and desirable but it will hurt you when search engines will not be able to read that data, hence organic traggic will be moved out of your list of ‘expected visitors’. (Check This Article : Optimizing Images For Search Engines)
Too Much Flash
=> Again, flash cannot be interpreted by search engines. You’re providing a video? search engines can’t see it. Having flash is not a problem at all but like images, having important content which you wan’t to be noticed by search engines and people in flash is a very very bad idea.
Ignoring URLs for SEO
=> Having the right structure for a URL(Uniform Resource Locator) is an absolute must. The URL’s have to be search engine friendly as well as good enough to be remembered by real users. Having a keyword in the URL is 50x more effective than having a keyword in the content specially for Yahoo and Msn.
Lack Of Maintenance And Consistency
=> Updating your content on a daily and atleast a bi-weekly basis is a must. Whenever you add content, search engine bots notice it, the more you add the more will the bot visit, hence you get indexed faster and your site is more noticeable to these bots provided your content is unique (you can choose http://www.copyscape.com to verfy your content for its uniqeness). Building backlinks has to be an eternal task that never ends unless your site has grown big enough to get backlinks on its own (by others linking to you). Halting this can cause your Pagerank to drop.
seo-mistakes-to-be-avoided
Giving Too Much Importance To Meta Tags
=> We are in the 21st century and search engines are far too smarter now. Meta tags are practically least important. Search Engines, i.e. mainly the major ones just don’t need them. Infact using meta tags gives away your SEO strategy(keywords targeted) to your competitors. Stuffing keywords in your meta keywords and meta descripion tag is a complete no-no. It will chase away even your potential organic visitors.
Spamming Backlinks
=> Having too many backlinks in a much less span of time can trigger a spam alert with the search engines. The only backlinks you need are the quality ones consisting of links placed on sites with high PR and relevant content. Having one PR2 backlink is far far better than having 20 PR0 backlinks.
The Title Tag
=> Leaving this tag empty is a common mistake. Having your keyword in your title tag is among the most important places to place them. Ignoring the title tag can make you lose on a great opportunity of on-page SEO. Another important fact is, the title loads before the website content, so if your site is slow the title atleast gives the visitors an idea of what can be expected on the site thus holding them on rather than they leaving.
