5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Whether you, or your website design company,  have been optimising your website pages or setting up a new strategy, it is very easy to make mistakes in SEO. These mistakes can have a significant effect on your page ranking but fortunately mistakes in SEO can be corrected. Below are 5 SEO mistakes to avoid:

SEO Mistake 1: Not using keywords correctly.

Many people who don't have much experience in SEO are concerned about being banned from the search engines for keyword spamming so they limit the use of keywords on their website pages. As long as your content sounds natural and is easy to read then the chances are you have not overused your keywords. Make sure your keywords are included in the first and last paragraphs, 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 realise. They recognise hidden text, keyword spamming, and cloaking (which is showing different content to the search engine spiders than to your visitors). All of these practices will simply 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

Flash is a great presentation tool and can be your website look very exciting and user friendly, unfortunately for most website owners 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 indexed so will not show up on search ranking.

SEO Mistake 4: Using Only Your Company Name as a Title Tag

Your company name shouldn't be the only contents in your title tag. Feel free to include it, however it’s also important to 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. Also it makes it easier to find from within the browser history.

SEO Mistake 5: Using A Splash Page

A splash page is a web page with a large graphic or company logo, and a link to enter the site. This is an ineffective strategy for a number of reasons:

• 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 optimisation is important to your business, you may need to skip the splash page.

Your home page should be very easy to navigate, full of useful contents with keywords and link visitors and spiders to other main website pages.

If you have committed a few of these mistakes as you were trying to out smart the spiders then simply correcting them can increase your page ranking almost immediately. Take some time to evaluate your SEO strategy and eliminate these SEO mistakes.

SEO Tip 3 - Keyword Placement

Website content is a very powerful tool you can use in your search engine optimisation strategy.

Contents optimised with keywords and published/changed regularly can rank your website to the top of the search engine.

Keywords are part of how search engines determine the relevance of your site for a particular search and helps the searcher know if your site is what they are searching.

The term “keywords” does not refer to Meta Keywords, which are obsolete and no longer used by search engines. It is important to remember that people don’t search by keywords anymore, they search by terms or phrases so bear this in mind when writing and optimizing your content.

There are different opinions on how often you should use keywords or terms in your content. As a general rule, keywords should be used naturally, not forced into the content so that it reads awkwardly or unnaturally to a human being.

Many beginners are tempted to place their keywords in every single sentence on there website, or on the footer of the website design all separated by commas. Best way to get a good quality content that is easy to read and also keyword/keyphrase rich is to write your content and then go back and position your keywords. Make sure to sprinkle other relevant keywords throughout your content as well. Thereafter read the content out and get it checked by others.

Keywords positioning is very important to get the most out of your SEO efforts. Below are locations on your website where the keywords are recognised by search engines:
• Your headline
• Any headings or subheadings in your content
• The first and last paragraphs of your content

Consider using one primary keyword or term per page rather than using all the keywords throughout all the pages. Keep it simple and optimise each website page with one primary keyword. You could
include a secondary keyword that might be an extension of the primary keyword ensuring you don't end up incorporating too many keywords into one page, as this can easily be done, basically don't get carried away with 'Keyword Placement'!