Digital Marketing

Common SEO Mistakes – Learn Them to Succeed

If you have a site that you wish to rank well in search engines such as Yahoo! and Google. There are many guides available with great information on how to improve your search engine rankings easily, but also need to know some of the common SEO mistakes so that you do not make them. Here are some of the biggest SEO mistakes that many people make, learn them so that you may avoid them:

No Keywords

One of the most common mistakes that webmasters make when designing their website is to fail to properly conduct their keyword research, either fully or partially. The two ways in which this can cause problems is that you are either building a site based on keywords or key phrases which get no search traffic or you have picked such highly competitive keywords or key phrases that you will never rank well, and thus never get any search engine traffic.

Be sure to check out one of the many free keyword tools on the Internet and do your research first. A simple query for something such as “keyword research tool” can easily yield you some valuable information on what keyword(s) to use for you new website.

SEO for Only Your Main/Index Page

Many people focus all of their SEO efforts on their main or index web page for each website. Even though the main page is usually the most crucial and the one that you want to rank well in the search engines you still should not forget about the other web pages on your website when you are doing your SEO work.

Do your keyword research and build backlinks for each web page on your website. Chances are good that each page will have a slightly different focus, using less competitive keywords for these pages gives you the opportunity to easily rank high in the search engines for different keywords. This is a great way to get some extra, and highly targeted, search engine traffic.

Be Careful with Your Links

Although link exchanges can seem like one of the best methods to get some free backlinks to your website you need to be careful with your links. There are a few things to be careful about when building backlinks.

Be careful about the number of outbound links that you place on each web page. Google has stated that there should be no more than one hundred outbound links per page. Any more than this and you can appear to be a ‘link farm’, or spam website built for the purpose of providing backlinks.

Be careful about both where you link to and who you have link to you. Many websites on the Internet are flagged as spam or bad sites by search engines like Google. Linking to them, or having them link to you, can be a sign to search engines that your site is also spam. This can actually hurt your SEO efforts rather than helping.

The myth that all backlinks are good is not true. Try to focus instead of quantity on quality backlinks. Build links from powerful and related websites, you will see an improvement.

Your Website’s Navigation

Bad website navigation can be detrimental to your search engine rankings. Although it is important that it looks nice, for your viewers, search engines also have to be able to properly navigate your website. Using all JavaScript can hurt you as search engine spiders do not negotiate JavaScript properly. In addition to this search engine spiders have limited abilities as far as interpreting Flash. They may be able to read basic text on Flash, but that is the extent of it.

If you must use JavaScript for navigation be sure to provide hard links, with anchor text, on the footer of your site for web spiders’ navigation. If your site is not navigable then it is not properly SEO ed.

Hopefully, by understanding these common SEO mistakes you will be able to avoid them and achieve much better placement in search engine results.

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