The Most Common SEO Mistakes

Before getting into advanced search engine optimization (SEO), it is important to make sure you cover the basics and to avoid the pitfalls that will earn your website a spot on Google’s black list or a place at the bottom of the search results. Below are a few examples of the most common mistakes made by young Internet marketers and web developers.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is considered to be a “black hat” SEO practice and there are several different ways this can be done. One common form of keyword stuffing involves placing unrelated popular search words in the keywords meta tag at the top of a webpage. Another method of keyword stuffing is building a hidden section in the HTML of the website containing a list of keywords or paragraphs containing the keywords. The goal of keyword stuffing is to attract traffic based on popular search words/phrases that may or may not have anything to do with the particular website. If a website is discovered to be committing keyword/content stuffing, it may be penalized by most of today’s popular search engines.

Non-Descriptive Page Titles

Another common mistake made by many web developers is the use of one common page title for every page in a website. Every page should have a unique title tag and it is especially important for all blog entry pages to have a title that matches the blog entry title. It should not be limited to the blog’s name or simply match the domain name.

Improper Link Building

It is important to get other websites to link to your site to help boost search engine rankings, however, the websites that link to your website should contain relevant themes. For instance, if you are trying to increase the traffic to your cat food website, you should try to find cat-related websites or pet care websites on which to post links. Posting a link about your cat food website on a college football blog will most likely be regarded as spam.

Wrong Choice of Keywords

It is extremely important to know what keywords people are searching for when looking for content that can be found on your website. For example, it is probably more common for someone to search for “college football” than it is for someone to search for “collegiate football”. Therefore, it is better to use the more popular phrasing on your site. Just be sure not to over-do it! Over-use of keywords can actually hurt your traffic rankings.

In conclusion, if you are feeling uncomfortable making decisions that will affect the SEO strategy of your business’s website, it may be a good idea to consult a professional or to purchase SEO software that helps manage many aspects of your SEO strategy. Many software suites help you find the right keywords to use, help you find similar websites, suggest directory sites, and automatically generate meta content such as keywords and content descriptions for each page. You can check out SEO Software Charts for more information.