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Are You Making These 10 SEO Mistakes?

Search engine optimization is as much as an art as it is a science. Since none of us know the exact “secret sauce” search engines use to rank websites, we are left to use our experience of evaluating top ranking websites. The question is how can we quickly evaluate websites and determine what made them rise to the top? Watching and learning from the top ranking websites can lead us to the right answers, but we have to go beyond what the naked eye can see in the search results and web pages. The bottom line is, you need to train your eyes to look for what search engines look for.

Of course we can never be a 100% sure we had found the answers to every single question, but in most case we can apply what we have learned and replicate it on our own websites with success.

In search engine optimization for every single positive ranking factor, there is an equivalent negative ranking penalty. For example, increasing the keyword count on a web page is a great way to increase keyword focus and relevance. However when a keyword is repeated too often, it quickly becomes keyword spam and can negatively affect ranking.

The Top 10 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

1. Don’t rely on images or flash for navigation or text display. The search engines can’t read text inside images, and not all search engines can read text embedded in flash. You could have a whole page of images, but your readable word count will be zero. Therefore the search engines will have no clue what your web page is about. If you insist on keeping your image or flash based navigation, you should ensure there are text links on every page containing the target keywords. An alternative description for images or ALT tags should be used on most of your images that require an explanation.
2. Don’t use frames. Search engines can’t read text in frames and the only alternative is using the NOFRAMES tag to give the search engines some content to crawl. In general frames should be completely avoided if possible.
3. Don’t stuff the <META> tags with keywords. META keywords will not help your search engine ranking in any way. Nonetheless META keywords and META descriptions are still important to use. The keywords used in the keyword META tag must also appear on the web page. You must create a unique META description for every web page, describing the content in one or two sentences. The META description is often used in the search engine result pages under the website link and can greatly increase the click through rate if it’s worded correctly.
4. Don’t focus on irrelevant or too many keywords in your <Title> tags. Are you still using “Welcome” or “Home Page” in your Title tags? One of the most important HTML elements to optimize is your web pages is the Title tag. Every single web page on your site must contain a unique title tag. As a rule the Title tag should contain 1-2 of the most frequently occurring keyword phrases of the web page. Avoid using stop words that are removed by the search engines in their results, such as “the, on, a, with…etc”. There is also a limit to how many characters the search engines will read from the title tag. Google’s cut off point is around 63 characters and Yahoo’s is 120.
5. Not using <H1-H3> tags, or bolding <Strong> or italicizing <i> keywords. Some HTML elements have a higher relevancy than others. Text placed in the above tags considered differently than regular text. The search engines look for H1, H2 ,H3 tags and bolded and italicized text to determine what the web page is focusing on. Heading tags can be used to break up web pages into logical sections and also give you an opportunity to place your keywords in them. The bolding and italicizing of text can draw the attention of your website visitors and the search engines as well.  
6. Not creating a site map. Think of a site map as a table of contents for a book. By creating a list of indexable pages of your website, you can ensure the search engines will crawl every page of your website even if your website’s internal navigation is not search engine friendly. Creating a site map is easy. You can use a free tool called Xenu that can create a site map for you.
7. Not optimizing internal navigational elements with your target keywords. Are you using these navigational links as anchor text…”home”, ”services”, “about us”, “contact us”, “products” ..etc? How many other companies do you know that sell products and services on the internet? When internal text links contain your target keywords, you are giving clues to the search engines about the target page and its keyword focus. Internal links should also be used in the body of your text pointing to relevant pages of your website.
8. Not enough or too many keywords in the body text. Going overboard with keyword optimization or the lack of keyword focus on web pages can be a real problem. Read your web page content out loud and watch for unnatural repetition of keywords to alert you to overuse of keywords. You can naturally increase the keyword count by first writing a draft copy of about 300 to 500 words length without thinking about keyword optimization. Once your draft is finished you can look for obvious places in the text where the target keywords can be used instead of simply referring to a product or service as “it, that, those, these.. etc”.
9. Not enough inbound links from relevant websites. Most websites suffer from serious link deficiency when it comes to competing on the search engines. Some of the link building techniques that worked well in the past, are now becoming ineffective. Reciprocal linking, general directory links and links from free ezine directories alone are not going to get you top ranking anymore. More than ever link relevancy from topically related, trusted websites will have a greater affect on search engine ranking than ever. Earn your link popularity by making your website a useful resource of free information and tools.
10. Not participating in your community, blogging, forums, article distribution white papers, web casts. Spreading the news about your website can take on many forms. You have to decide what type of participation in your market segment is the most appropriate for you. You should open every possible avenue for your website to be talked about, book marked or being linked to.

In Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction, for every positive ranking boost there is an equivalent negative ranking penalty if not executed properly. Since we don’t know with a 100% certainty what the magic ranking formula is to get top ranking, we have to rely on reverse engineering top websites and our own experience. By sharing our experiences with you, hopefully you will avoid making these top 10 costly mistakes in SEO.