There are lots of seo mistakes we make while working on our websites and blogs. And these seo sins ultimately result in low page rank, lower amount of traffic on your website and more importantly bad experience for search engines and website users. In today’s post, I’m going to mention 10 seo mistakes that we should avoid with our website and in case, any of our website is involved in any of these SEO sins, should work removing those problems from our website.
1. Title Tags
The biggest mistake lots of website owners make is that they don’t use Title Tag altogether. And if they happen to use it, don’t use it to its fullest potential. Our website Titles should be according to the kind of content we are offering on those pages. So we should include our main keywords in the Title Tag, bit make sure it looks sensible and should limit it to 65 characters. Also make sure that each page on your website has its own Title, no single Title should be used on multiple URL’s on your website.
2. URL Structure
Then it comes about the URL structure. We should use SEO friendly URL’s for website pages and don’t forget to include your main keywords in your URL Structure. By looking at the URL of a page, we should be able to decide the kind of content will be offered to us when we open that page. For a page about SEO mistakes, should include the keyword SEO mistake in its URL. But don’t make a spammy URL that includes too many keywords.
3. Missing Meta Keywords and Descriptions
Make sure each page on a website has its own Meta Keyword and Meta Description Values entered. Don’t repeat the same value over and over on your website. Information shared in the Meta tags should be according to the kind of content you are providing on that page. Most search engine shows your Meta description as part of your listing in its search engine results. No doubt, Meta tags holds very little value on Google, but they still very important on Yahoo and Bing.com.
4. Non www vs. www
Your website should be available in one version only i.e. with www or without www. If you are allowing the existence of both versions, you are creating delicacy within your website. That could result in lower pagerank and search engine rankings. Like for my SFM blog, www version is available and non www version is redirected to www version.
5. Keywords in your content
Don’t forget to include your main keywords within your website content, include them in a way so that they look natural. And keep the keyword density within your content less than 2 percent. You should include synonyms and related keywords to make your content more search engine friendly.
6. Image ALT text
Every image on your website should have proper ALT text attached. By adding ALT text with every image, you make them search engine friendly and become eligible for getting more traffic from search engines especially image search. Also having image ALT text makes good user experience. Imagine how your page will look like in the absence if ALT text and within images off.
7. Proper Anchor Text
Always get links with proper Anchor text whether you are getting it from other websites or practicing it on your own website. Anchor texts like ‘Click here’ or ‘For More Info’ make sense only when you want to get high rankings for them. So stop using these generic anchor texts and start using keyword based anchor texts for better search engine rankings to the linking pages. Suppose I want to get this post in top 1o for ‘SEO Mistakes’ keyword, so the ideal approach will be getting links with anchor texts like SEO mistakes, seo mistake, seo sins, top seo mistakes with caps and dashes etc while doing it internally or getting links from external websites.
8. Flash Websites
If you have flash based websites, you will have problem in getting rankings for that website in search engines as search engines does not understand that kind of content. So to get traffic from search engines, you should create a HTML version of that website and submit it to search engines.
9. Using image headers and menus
No doubt, image makes our website look really professional, but search engines don’t understand the content placed inside images or iframe tag. So if you are using images for your heading or navigation menus or any kind of link pointing to your website pages, replace that with text. You will be able to link your website pages with proper anchor text by using text instead of images, which will help you get better rankings for linking pages. And the same thing applied to heading tags i.e. H1, H2, and H3 etc. If are afraid that using text in heading tags will take away the professional look of your website, spend some time with your stylesheets to make your heading text look normal.
10. Wrong keyword selection
Lots of webmasters and bloggers make the mistake of targeting wrong keywords. Sometime they target keywords, which have no searches at all, so if you are able to get into top 10 for such keywords, you will not get any benefit. Sometime they target too generic and most competitive keywords like blog, seo, blogging etc where they will be competing with websites like Wikipedia, Google, and About.com etc. So in both cases, they are unable to get traffic to their websites and blogs. So the ideal situation will be targeting keywords with lesser competition and some searches on daily basis. So for this purpose, I would suggest spending some time doing keyword research for your website using Keyword research tools available here.
Some mixed issues
Here are some more seo mistakes, you might make while working on your website:
- Lots of people use iframes and java scripts to show some content on their websites, which is not read by search engines, so avoid using them.
- Avoid using hidden text on your website. If you are currently doing it, remove all hidden text from your website.
- Lots of webmasters don’t use heading, strong, bold etc tag on their websites, would recommend using them where they make sense.
- On lots of occasions, we create content duplicacy within our website by using the same content on multiple pages. I would suggest using one content on one URL only. And if you are using the same content on multiple pages, you are creating duplicacy within your website. It’s fine to use a snippet of page content on other pages on your website or external websites, with a link back to that page.
These were the 10 SEO mistakes or sins, which came to my mind, most bloggers and webmasters exercises while working on their blogs and websites. Are you making any of these seo mistakes on your website, share in the comments section below? Also share if I missed any other common seo sins.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
my intention is to make money by blogging, and they need a blog with high page rank which is take a long time to build, it’s easier to buy the existing one.
Do people still build flash sites and expect them to rank? What a horrible thought!
Flash has to be the worst ever for SEO since google doesn’t even see the keywords. I figured that out after my first flash site.
Caleb
Great info – you’d be surprised how many folks don’t know about these issues.
Joel
http://www.internetmarketingace.com
Good knowledge and perfect understanding as been share about getting higher ranking of your website by google seo.
With Regards,
Mr.Hillary
Thanks to this I was able edit the wrong keyword I’ve input on to my blog. I was thinking that keywords don’t matter that much but as I read this article, I was corrected and found out that it’s one of what they called an SEO sin. Thanks for the info guys! It’s very helpful.
There are really lots of sins in making SEO to your blog. In order to obtain the best PR one must secure that all needed information are fill up so that what you expect as first page in rank will be achieved. I strongly agree of what this articles suggest as a guide. Keep it up.
Is it true that Flash Websites seldom or does not get rankings? As what I’ve known, google loves videos. But thanks for the information. There’s a follow-up solution given which is to create HTML version of the website. Now I can expect traffic to my site.
I was expecting that putting images in headers and menus adds a good PR to a certain site. But what I discovered, ensuring a proper anchor text will help in ranking purposes. Maybe it’s just for the PR, but what people sometimes looks is the design of the site. Maybe it does depend on managing a certain sites.
I would suggest a class or two on optimization, btw…even local community colleges offer them these days. I would not suggest attacking the advice of an online SEO expert though, until you actually learn more about all items that are factored into Google’s SEO algorithm.
Thanks for these great words of wisdom. I must take another look at our site to make sure we have all of the bases covered.
I agree about flash and seo problems, we had our site rebuilt and now we have excellent ranking.
Thanks for a very useful, well written article. I will take this all on board.