SEO Mistakes to Avoid

SEO Mistake #1  Not using keywords correctly.

Are you so concerned about being banned from the search engines for keyword spamming or stuffing that you have  limited your use of keywords all together?  Good news as long as your content sounds natural and reads easily, the chances are you have not overused your keywords.

TIP   Make sure your keywords are included in the first paragraph, in your headings and in your title and meta tags.

SEO Mistake #2  Trying to fool search engine spiders.

Search engines are a lot more sophisticated than most of us realize. There are no-no’s such as  hidden text, keyword spamming, and cloaking,( which is showing different content to the search engine spiders than to your visitors).  These practices  serve to hurt your page ranking and can in fact cause your website to be banned by the search engines, which means no one will find you and no traffic means no profits.

SEO Mistake #3  Using Flash

Use Flash  if you have a media related website and want to demonstrate your industry savvy.  However for most of us, it’s just not necessary and can harm your page ranking. Search engine spiders cannot read content embedded in Flash files, which means they’re not recognized or indexed. 
SEO Mistake #4 Using Your Company Name As a Title Tag

 Are you branding your company name?  If not include it in the title tag, but is should not be the only element in your title tag.  Use your primary keyword for each webpage title tag.  This is more useful for your customers and helps the search engines identify the various pages on your site.
SEO Mistake #5 Using A Splash Page

A splash page, in case you’re unfamiliar, is a web page with a large graphic or company logo, and a link to enter the site.  Reason this is not an effective strategy

* No keyword rich text on the page, nothing for the spiders to index.
* Only one internal link on the page
* These pages often have a redirect which often causes spiders to ignore them

If search engine optimization is important to your business, you may need to forgo the splash page. Your home page should be easy to navigate, content rich, and link visitors and spiders to other main web pages. 

The majority of search engine  mistakes are reversible.  If you’ve committed a few of these mistakes, simply correcting them can increase your page ranking almost immediately.  Take some time to evaluate your SEO strategy and eliminate these SEO mistakes.