Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific keywords it returns your site in a high ranked position in that particular search engine.

Unless you have set aside a huge marketing budget, then your website’s success will most probably rely on the amount of traffic you get via the major search engines. The most used search engine by far on the internet is Google, with around 60% of all searches going through it. The other 40% is made up by, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.

It is extremely important to get your website onto the major search engines and with over 25 billion web pages currently indexed by Google, how can you make certain people will find your website? There are several techniques that you can apply to your website to rank higher on Google and improve the ranking position of your website in the search engine results page. Generally there are two ways of splitting up the technique process, one technique is internal optimisation of your website and the other is external optimisation.

Internal optimisation of your website is basically changing your actual website like keywords, titles, adding new rich content and creating new pages. While External optimisation does not involve changing anything on your website, rather it involves techniques like placing links on other websites that point back to your website and even article writing.

For your website to do well in the search engines you must apply both internal and external optimisation to your website.

The 10 worst SEO Mistakes

It is great to know how to rank well in all major search engines, but avoiding the following mistakes is a must no matter the cost;

1. Using Javascript for your navigation

Javascript is not used by Google and if your site navigation relies on it to work, the pages that your site navigation points to wont be picked up by Google. Avoid DHTML Drop Down Menus, go for a more search engine friendly alternative.

2. Making your whole website from Flash

Using flash creates a wonderful look for your website, but moderation is the key here as all search engines find it hard to index sites that are designed in the flash. Use Flash on your site but do not build the whole site in Flash.

3. Using Tables for Layout 

Data tables were used to create the layout for correct placement of text and images, this was before web standards come out by the search engine companies. Tables use a lot of code than the web standards like CSS and XHTML, this affects placement of your content and it will appear lower down on the page and in turn is less important to Google.

4. Using Frames

Google finds it hard to index your site when frames are used. They also mean that surfers that do find your site are likely to be stuck on that page without any navigation.

5. Misusing Images

Commercial websites often look great but the fact of the matter is that Google can’t see these images. So if your site is full of images and has no text and no (alt Text), then the subject of the website, will not be known to Google and therefore will not be able to index your site. Do use images on your site but make sure you have at least 60 words of content on each page that you want indexed.

6. Duplicate or Bad Content

Making sure your website content is unique and significant to your product or service is very important in Search engine optimisation success. In most cases people just copy content from other websites. Most often than not, these websites fail miserably in search engine rankings.

If you are not able to write decent and unique content (go here and discover how to write great content) for your website than find someone online that will write relevant and fresh content for you. It is worthwhile spending the time or money to get this right. Make sure that the content is good, friendly and unique. If you are listed in the supplemental index of Google then making sure your titles, descriptions, Meta keywords and on page content is unique is the only way to drag them out of the supplemental index.

7. Dreadful internal Page Links

It is vital to make sure that the anchor text linking to all your internal pages on your website is appropriate to the intended target page. Make sure the title tag is filled in also for each link. You have the utmost control over links from within your own website so make sure they are significant and that link title and the on page copy match the main keywords of the target page.

8. Being Impatient

Search Engine Optimisation is not a short term assignment. It is a continual process of refinement and fine tuning. Implementing SEO on your website could take hours on end to get it right, from producing unique content, checking it, validating, listing and checking the search engines and making sure they have it listed correctly. Search Engine companies like Google are forever changing their ranking and rating systems, so if you think you have done enough and have found yourself on the front page doesn’t mean you will sit in that position forever. So always be on the move to improve your website with fresh content, new links and this will ensure that you stay ahead of your competition.

9. Selection of Keywords

Selecting the right keywords is a tricky business and a lot of people have found this out the hard way. The keywords you may think people are typing in the search engines may not be necessarily correct. It is a very, very important step to do the correct keyword research and make sure you have the correct keyword list before you optimise any pages with them. Using Overture, Google Ads and some other paid keyword tools like WordTracker are important to success in finding excellent keywords. It is important to localise your target market and figure out what they are actually searching on when they are looking for products or services that you offer. Do the research and be as specific as possible while still being broad enough to capture some high keyword traffic.

10. Bad Titles

Having great titles on each of your web pages are the most important thing to Search engines. Search engines spiders see the title on your page first and they make a general evaluation about it based upon this. They scan the page and make sure the content of the page matches the title and then assign rankings based upon these matches and how they best fit. The title tag is the best way to inform the search engine what your page is about, and they play an important part in ranking if used properly. Placing your main identified keywords in the title and ensuring to obey the rule of leftward and stemming is vital – leftward rule, the closer the word to the left of the sentence the more important it is.