5 Common SEO Mistakes

Posted on 05. Jun, 2009 by admin in Guides

Splash Intro Page
One of the common trends today is to have Splash Intro Page, or a page that is solely of graphics and flash with one or two image links to the main content. While this may give your website a modern and updated appearance it inhibits the search engine crawlers from properly indexing your website. Your homepage is the highest ranked and most crawled page on your website, therefore it needs to contain the necessary keywords and content to ensure that your page is ranked correctly.

Image and Flash Content
Like Splash Intro Pages, Flash and the heavy use of graphics are common trends for people wanting a modern and trendy website. The downside of this is a lack of the HTML based text that is needed by the search engine crawlers. One common mistake is to embed text within an image or Flash fine. This can be avoided by simply using CSS to overlay text over an image or Flash file using divisions.

Duplicate Content
Search engines frown upon copied content. This includes content from other websites, as well as content on your own website. Ultimately the more content you have, the higher you will most likely rank. If you have multiple pages with the same content, or content that matches a competitors website, your ranking will actually go down. If your lacking content ideas it is fine to look to other websites for inspiration, feel free to take what they have and improve upon it. Adding your own twist to it could be the key to pulling traffic from competitors websites, to your own.

Lack of Content
While your website should not be treated like a pad of paper where you write down everything on your mind, it does need a fair amount of content to rank higher. Often times site owners do not plan their websites out properly and fail to include enough room to for necessary text content. Need content ideas? Write down a list of keywords that you think could be used to search for your website. Now go over each word, one at a time, and brainstorm sentences or paragraphs that can be created with that word. Once you have done this with a some or all of your words, read the sentences back to yourself and with an open mind you will always find ways to seamlessly merge them together.

Improper Coding
This is one of the most common mistakes, but also the easiest mistake to avoid or fix. Simply adding small amounts of code to certain tags will actually improve your search ratings. These include “alt” attribute in the image tag, different titles on each page, adding “meta tag” keywords and a description in the head of the page, and ensuring that each tag is closed. With a WYSIWYG text editor you can make these changes in less than 10 minutes per page.