Search Engine Optimization

Common Mistakes

Top Most Common SEO Mistakes (not necessarily in order):

Optimizing your site for the wrong keywords
Keyword flooding/spamming
Creating lots of similar doorway pages
Using Hidden Text
Flash/Splash sites
Javascript navigation
Pages that contain only graphics
Header area duplication
Not utilizing the TITLE tag

Many search engine optimizers have been guilty of an SEO mistake at some point in their career. Even yours truly.

When optimizing web pages it is important to remember a few basics:

Your text needs to be visible to search engines. This means it needs to be in HTML, and full of substance and meaning. Don't use a lot of marketing babble. Keep the content rich, concise and focused. Be sure to include a few relevant keywords and keyphrases here and there without making the content confusing or unreadable for the visitor.

You might come across sites that are flash-driven or highly graphical. These types of sites are great for highly recognized brands such as Coca-Cola or McDonalds who don't really need to get those high rankings. Trying to optimize a flash-driven site is extremely difficult.

Search engine spiders can't see your content. So they think you don't have any. All you can really do is set up your meta tags and hope that one day the spiders can read everything in a flash file! That might be a little way down the road...

I still come across sites that don't utilize title tags and meta tags. Meta tags are probably the simplest, almost-any-one-can-do-it, method of optimizing a web page. One of the most important and easiest things to do when optimizing a web page is to have your keyword or phrase for that particular page in the title tag.

Prevention is better than cure! It is much easier to do it right from the start. Constructing a new web site with the end user AND the search engines in mind is always going to be simpler than trying to amend months or years of damage.