3 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Posted on 20. Apr, 2011 by in Internet, SEO & Rank, Websites

SEO MistakesOptimizing your website to gain search engine positioning can be a process that takes a lot of time and focus. It’s no wonder a lot of entrepreneurs hire SEO firms to handle this for them. But that can be very expensive, and it’s hard to know which firms are the best. While many stick to “white hat” practices, others resort to actions that can get your site penalized if found out.

There are a lot of SEO tactics you can employ yourself though, and there are some mistakes a lot of site owners make that are hurting their search engine rankings. Correcting just a few things can actually make a significant difference. Below are three of the most common mistakes made by online entrepreneurs. Correcting these won’t guarantee you a first place Google position, but it will get you on the right track.

1. Ineffective Page Titles – If the name of your company is all that comes up at the top of your site’s pages (in the title bar), it will only help improve searches for your company name. And those searches aren’t made by people you need to attract. They already know who you are. To attract people searching for what you do rather than who you are, customize the <title> tag for each page to reflect what that page is about, being sure to use key search terms whenever possible. This will increase the chances of your site coming up as a search result for those keywords.

2. Placing Text in an Image – If you’re not an html or php pro, it can be difficult to get your site to line up exactly as you want it. All those <div> and <style> tags can be a real pain. So putting text in an image is a great idea, right? It’s lined up exactly where you want it, and you can even use funky fonts! But hold on. Search engines don’t know a picture of a squirrel from an image of your bio. To them, it’s just an image. So any keywords or phrases that are in the text within the image are not considered at all for SEO purposes. Sure, you can add <alt> and <title> tags to your images, and that will help to a degree, but it isn’t actual content, and content is what the search engines love most.

If you’re trying to optimize your site for search engine ranking, be more concerned with the context of your text than the design. That’s not to say design isn’t important. It is very important from the standpoint of providing the right experience for your site visitors. But you can have both – a great looking site that has a first page search engine position.

3. Not Using Analytics – Google analytics (or comparable statistics tools) can make a big difference for you in a lot of ways. Using Google analytics isn’t going to help your SEO directly, but it will tell you if what you’re doing is paying off, and that’s worth a ton. Many site owners are just concerned with how many hits their site is getting. This is an important statistic, but only in conjunction with other numbers.

For example, if your site gets 2,000 hits a day, but 90% bounce (leave practically immediately after arriving), it’s not doing you much good. Studying your bounce rates, traffic sources, click-throughs, and other pertinent information will tell you if what you’re doing is working. And if you’re tackling your site’s SEO on your own, you need that knowledge. A big part of making SEO work is tweaking it as you go to constantly improve, and analyzing your stats will help you identify holes and make adjustments as necessary.

Again, SEO isn’t as easy as a lot of people think, but just about everyone can improve their site’s search engine status to some degree, simply by avoiding the above mistakes. What other SEO blunders do you see site owners making? Share with the community in the comments below.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: , , , , ,

13 Responses to “3 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid”

  1. Cheap Seo India;Sag IT solution

    20. Apr, 2011

    After reading this article would like to say that to improve your search engine ranking you must remove your canonical issues and your url should be in correct form because it is very powerful tool, you should not committed these kind of mistake. If you will pay attention on these things it will help to improving your search engine ranking.

    Reply to this comment

  2. Graeme Trigg

    21. Apr, 2011

    I would add a fourth: fighting SEO battles you cannot win. I strongly advocate using relatively simple and cheap tools like Market Samurai (www.marketsamurai.com) to spot the keywords you can make some progress with, and focus on those rather than those where the competition is simply too strong!

    Reply to this comment

  3. Marketing Philosophy

    21. Apr, 2011

    Thanks for this helpful article, there are always simple things you can do to optimize a page for search engines but most people just ignore them, probably because they just don’t know them or they don’t understand how powerful small tips are…

    Reply to this comment

  4. Jamie Fairbairn

    22. Apr, 2011

    I’d like to add another of my own. Using the right anchor text can make a difference when linking from one web page to another.

    I see so many websites with “click here” as their anchor text and they’re missing a great opportunity to use their chosen keywords and phrases.

    Reply to this comment

  5. Jim Campbell

    26. Apr, 2011

    I still see a lot of keyword stuffing which feels like greed which, or course, is quite counterproductive, on the Internet and in life….

    Reply to this comment

  6. Peter Buzzrain

    28. Apr, 2011

    Good tips, especially the first one.

    I find that titles are something you should spend at least 5 minutes brainstorming before finally publishing.

    My process to come up with a good title is to put myself in a user position and imagine what would make me excited and interested in reading the post!

    Reply to this comment

  7. EO Alchemy

    29. Apr, 2011

    Great article on understanding the fundamentals of SEO. Really helpful for those who are either thinking about using SEO for their company or already using it.

    Reply to this comment

  8. fazal mayar

    01. May, 2011

    Good tips, its also important to write for human visitors and not just for search engines. As for google analytics, i think everyone should use it as a lot of other stats stuff is inflated by bots and spiders and do not show your correct traffic stats.

    Reply to this comment

  9. Alejo A

    02. May, 2011

    Very good information! I think its very important to create GOOD backlinks! not just create backlinks, but GOOD backlinks, that’s gonna help you with ur seo! I mean websides with pagerank 3.4.5.6.7! Regards!

    Reply to this comment

  10. Setup a Pro WP Site

    08. Jun, 2011

    The Bouncing thing is one I came to understand only some time ago, until then I just disregarded it and thought of it as of some ball bouncing or whatever…

    Reply to this comment

  11. cheap gift ideas

    30. Aug, 2011

    alt tag optimization is a new thing for me and i would like to appreciate it as it gave me new domain of seo.

    Reply to this comment

  12. Software Development

    07. Sep, 2011

    Great article. Another mishap newbies tend to do when working on SEO is choosing a title that has no relation to the page content.

    Reply to this comment

  13. Windows Server Hosting

    18. Sep, 2011

    Great points, We will avoid it while creating pages. Other then that we have many SEO concepts need to be considered. Thanks for the great article. Thanks.

    Ahsima

    Reply to this comment

Leave a Reply